The former governor of China’s central bank explains the intentions behind the country’s planned digital currency.
The Chinese digital currency is intended to strengthen domestic payment transactions and at the same time prevent the “dollarization” of its own economy, as a former central banker in the country now reveals
Zhou Xiaochuan, the president of the Chinese Finance Association and the former governor of the Chinese Central Bank (PBoC), made the relevant statements at the Eurasia Conference on October 27th. He explained that the approach of the Chinese digital currency is fundamentally different from the approach of the G7 countries, i.e. Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Great Britain and the USA.
According to Xiaochuan, the G7 intend with their planned digital currencies above all to „meet the challenges that have arisen from Libra, Bitcoin and similar crypto projects“, while China’s central bank wants to use its own digital currency mainly to improve payment transactions in the domestic economy to prevent the US dollar from gaining importance in the country.
„In China we are working very hard on our DCEP, which is our digital currency, and electronic payments,“ said Xiaochuan at the conference. To which he added: „However, we set our focus differently than the G7 countries.“
And further:
“We have to prevent dollarization. This is one of the fundamental points in the design of our Chinese digital currency. “
The other economic powers of the world are indeed setting their priorities differently, and are primarily concerned with the planned launch of the Facebook cryptocurrency Libra. They even see it as a threat to the global financial system, which is why the G7 members issued a joint statement on October 12, in which they announced that they would prevent any global stablecoin that is not adequately regulated.
The Canadian central bank is therefore already working on its own central bank digital currency (CBDC), which should be ready if Libra is ultimately pushed forward. Tiff Macklem, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, believes that a “coordinated global” strategy is needed to prevent criminals from misusing digital currencies.
China has already launched a pilot program for the digital yuan that distributed $ 1.5 million in funds to 47,500 people in Shenzhen city. Although the Chinese CBDC has not yet been officially published, the country’s central bank has already tabled a bill to pave the way for digital currency.