That’s not “backing”: nobody buys specifically to keep gold prices up or to legitimise the trade, they just use it as a commodity to make their creditworthiness believable and storing their value in a practical way. They are leveraging a pre-existing market, not backing it.
(As a side note, this role for gold is clearly legacy: look at how little gold China stores, compared to their overall reserves.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve