The Joint Office of the Yiwu Digital Renminbi Pilot Task Force put out the “Plan on Deepening Pilot Work on the Digital Renminbi” during the recently held Yiwu International Trade Market which lists 10 ways to improve the pilot.
Yiwu intends to create a digital renminbi circulation ecosystem with the assistance of various industries. It will accomplish this using its well-developed business and trade environment. The digital renminbi will be able to be used without any problems, which will help create a business environment that is easy, quick, fair, competitive, stable, and clear.
Yiwu trades with more than 230 nations and regions and has more than 2.1 million small and medium-sized businesses. With up to 65% of its buildings facing outward, the city has been called the “World Supermarket,” and there are many ways to pay there.
By the end of 2023, Yiwu hopes to have a 90% coverage rate for offline merchant payment scenarios and a 95% coverage rate for the online platform Chinagoods.
In addition, Zhejiang province intends to build three major platforms for digital renminbi prepaid fund supervision, supply chains, and trade supervision, as well as to develop replicable and scalable commercial application models.
The renminbi (RMB), China’s legal currency, has been transformed into the electronic Chinese yuan (e-CNY), also known as the digital yuan and officially known as the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DC/EP). It is issued by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), China’s central bank. It is intended primarily for high-frequency, small-scale retail purchases and transactions.
The e-CNY is part of the country’s monetary base (M0), which means it accounts for a portion of the ‘cash’ in circulation.
According to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a government think tank, China’s digital economy is expected to exceed 60 trillion yuan ($8.84 trillion) by 2025.
This year, Shanghai and provinces like Zhejiang, Fujian, and Hebei have made plans for their economic growth. They emphasised the importance of developing the digital economy and called for the creation of blueprints for future industries, such as the metaverse, an immersive virtual world enabled by virtual reality and augmented reality.
Data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology indicates that by the end of 2022, China will have constructed more than 2,3 million 5G base stations and will be able to connect more than 500 million households to a gigabit optical network.
Also, the Ministry said that digital connections for the mobile Internet of Things (IoT) in China reached 1.84 billion in 2022. This made China the first major economy in the world to have more mobile IoT connections than mobile users. The IoT is a network of devices, vehicles, and other objects that are equipped with software or sensors that allow them to connect and exchange data.
Zhao Zhiguo, the Ministry’s spokesman, China’s mobile IoT connections account for 70% of the global total and have covered the 45 major categories of the national economy, while, Wang Zhiqin, Vice President of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, cited that the nation has built a good telecom infrastructure that will serve as a solid foundation for China’s digital economy’s high-quality development.
He added that previously, consumer-oriented internet applications such as e-commerce drove China’s digital economy, but now business-oriented applications such as industrial internet are playing a much larger role. This demonstrates that the digital economic structure has improved.
