A woman who has consistently urged reform of China’s capital controls, but not the regulation of the yuan’s exchange rate, was appointed on Monday as the head of the agency that executes the country’s currency policy.

46-year-old Hu Xiaolian is the first woman to head the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and is now one of the most senior females in the government hierarchy. She graduated from the central bank’s university and was at SAFE starting in the early 1990s. She worked as its deputy director between 2001 and 2004.

SAFE’s goal is to manage China’s over $600 billion in foreign-exchange reserves and to set parameters for the government’s domestic currency policy, according to the Wall Street Journal. "Ms. Hu is a firm supporter of bringing in more flexibility to the foreign-exchange mechanism and eventually liberalizing the renminbi," or yuan, said Zhong Wei, an economist at Beijing Normal University in an interview with James T.Areddy.

Commenting on the policy, Ms. Hu has stressed that China needs to improve the controls on its currency to better reflect supply and demand. A fixed exchange rate China has had since 1994 results in economic distortions, she has said, while avoiding saying that the exchange rate itself should be adjusted.

Some of the reforms she has promoted in the past year are now being implemented, such as shaping a market-maker system in compliance with the local currency exchange system and enabling banks to trade global currencies inside the country.