China Is Winning the Digital Currency War With the U.S.
China aspires to control the world’s reserve currency. In a world where most payments are digital, this is a pretty scary scenario.
Here’s a question: You’re China. You know that over the next two decades, payments will continually be shifting to the digital realm. With ambitions to make the renminbi the world’s reserve currency, and with a strategy of surveilling your citizens and the rest of the world, what would you then do?
The answer is clear: Try to create the dominant global platform for digital money.
This is more than an idle question. China has announced the development of its national digital currency, the Digital Currency Electronic Payment. The goal of DCEP is to extend the international reach of the renminbi and replace the U.S. dollar as the de facto global currency. This goes hand in hand with President Xi Jingping’s mandate that the “country’s development of blockchain technology should be sped up.”