China still has room for conventional monetary expansion, but its ability to deal successfully with a crisis depends on whether monetary policy can work together with fiscal and structural reform policies, China’s former central bank head Zhou Xiaochuan said

“We can still try to avoid getting very soon into the negative interest rates area, if we can successfully manage macroeconomic control in this regard,” Zhou said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. “Then we don’t need to consider that much about unconventional monetary policy.”

Global monetary authorities should think about how to prevent crises from occurring, and should “try our best” to avoid lowering interest rates all the way to zero before a crisis begins, Zhou said. He emphasized that rates in China are still much higher than in other developed nations.

Zhou, who led the People’s Bank of China from 2002-2018, said debt bubbles and the impact of the trade war with the U.S. would be his main concerns going forward.