Plenty of smart money is betting on the rise of the yuan, but some overseas foreign exchange investors are looking the other way.

Contrarians range from hedge funds to wealth management firms, and they generally agree that the possibility of yuan devaluation against the U.S. dollar is at least slightly greater than market consensus. Chinese policymakers, meanwhile, are not rushing to argue the point.

"We are indeed shorting the yuan," investment manager Cullen Thompson of the New York firm Bienville Capital Management LLC told Caixin.