Marianne Björklund: China aims for Olympic gold with digital currency

I have almost no debit card or cash with me for shopping in China. Payment by card is almost exclusively possible in large hotel chains and in some international clothing stores. Criticism is accepted, but it is used largely only by a shrinking elderly crowd.

Instead, payments in most cases are made via the two apps Wechat, which is operated by internet giant Tencent, or Alipay, owned by Ant Group.

When buying coffee, show your code on your mobile phone and the cashier scans it. Or vice versa, you can scan the store code and enter the amount you have to pay and your personal code. Then it is done.

who’s trying Pay by card, there is often a machine to deal with these things, they are often met with surprised faces. Sometimes this happens after a group of employees have consulted with each other and together come up with how to make a card payment.

Therefore, it is somewhat strange that the card company Visa is one of the main sponsors of the Olympics. Admittedly, the company has been around for decades. But during the Winter Olympics, China also managed to turn around as it would also be possible to pay with electronic yuan. It is the name of the country’s digital currency that has so far only been tested in pilot projects across the country.

The digital currency was developed by the state and added as a force in opposition to the commercial giants that the regime believes have become too big and have access to so much information and information about the population that the Chinese state itself wants to control. Recently, both Ant Group and Tencent have been hit with blows to reduce their dominance. Among other things, they were banned from trading in cryptocurrencies.

China is not alone in the development of digital currency. Similar plans are underway in several countries, including Sweden. But a few leading economies have made it to China, where pilot projects began in a number of cities as early as 2020. At that time, residents of a number of selected cities could win e-yuan in lotteries and then use it in shops and cafes.

But the Olympics are the biggest test ever for the electronic yuan and mean foreigners can use it for the first time. Electronic yuan also requires an app, or you can access the currency by depositing money into something similar to a debit card.

According to Reuters, citing China’s central bank, 2 million yuan is being paid daily during the Winter Olympics. But China is a monitoring society and before the games, warnings were issued against using the currency for the wrong purpose. Jeremy Fleming, head of the UK’s Cyber ​​Security Agency, warned in an interview with financial times.

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