China has a new central banker: Yi Gang, outgoing Governor Zhou Xiaochuan’s longtime deputy. Investors should be cheered that a U.S.-trained economist—known, like his boss, as an advocate of market-based reforms—nabbed the role.
They should also recognize his limitations. Fixing China’s financial system—and making further substantial moves toward a free-floating yuan—requires real state-enterprise reform, a dim prospect under Xi Jinping, China’s powerful statist president. China’s central bank has plenty of talent within its...