SHANGHAI - The Chinese yuan will remain attractive internationally due to the nation's rapid economic expansion and gradual opening-up of its capital account, officials and industry experts said.

"The internationalization of renminbi is likely to pick up," Il Houng Lee, the International Monetary Fund's senior resident representative in China, said on Thursday at a financial conference in Shanghai.

The level of the yuan on the global stage in the next decade may become as high as the Japanese yen was over the past 20 years, Lee said.