China’s central bank buys gold for 16th month straight in February despite near-record prices
China’s central bank added gold to its reserves for the 16th consecutive month in February, even as escalating geopolitical tensions kept the price of bullion not far from January’s all-time highs.
The People’s Bank of China added 30,000 ounces of gold to its reserves last month, bringing its total gold holdings to 74.2 million ounces of gold as of the end of February, valued at approximately $387.6 billion, according to the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE).
Since November 2024, the PBOC has increased its gold holdings by a total of 1.4 million ounces.
As of the end of February, the data showed China’s foreign exchange reserves stood at $3.4 trillion, up $8.7 billion from the end of January and marking the seventh consecutive monthly increase in total reserves. The increase was driven largely by exchange-rate conversion effects and asset price appreciations resulting from the strengthening U.S. dollar index, SAFE said.
The PBoC has been making major gold headlines recently. In late December, reports emerged that China purchased a record $961 million in gold from Russia in November 2025 – the largest gold deal in the history of bilateral trade.
This was the second month in a row that gold deliveries from Russia to China exceeded $900 million, the report noted, citing Chinese customs data. In October, exports of Russian gold to China were estimated at $930 million.
The rate of purchases also appears to have ramped up dramatically toward the end of the year, with October and November representing almost all the bilateral trade in the precious metal for 2025: From January through November, China imported a total of $1.9 billion of Russian gold, almost nine times more than in the same period last year, when purchases did not exceed $223 million.
The sharp increase in purchases comes as China ramps up its policy of increasing its gold reserves in order to reduce its dependence on the U.S. dollar. And while the purchases recorded in official data are staggering, the real figure could be orders of magnitude higher.
In October, French banking giant Société Générale’s estimated, based on the contrast between bullion imports, domestic production, and official reserves, that Beijing’s true gold purchases may have increased 10 times more than the PBOC figures – by 250 tons rather than 25. The analysis was based on UK gold exports, which are one of the most reliable indicators of physical flows. This metric indicates that China has added more than 1,080 tons of gold to its reserves since mid-2022.
