China Eyeing Own Cryptocurrency to Maintain Financial Control

A New York times article discussed how Facebook’s announcement of the Libra has accelerated China’s efforts to create their own national digital currency.

China previously started to looking into creating a national digital currency back in 2014 when the People’s Bank of China created a cryptocurrency research group and even their central bank’s governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, openly pondered creating a national digital currency. However, the progress appeared to slow when the Chinese government cracked down on Bitcoin mining operations during the 2017 price surge.

China is famous for having a detailed surveillance state and it is commonly known that transactions that pass through the Chinese banking system can and will be monitored by the government. However, the country’s two dominate mobile payment platforms, Alipay and WeChat Pay, are technically private companies and thus require the government to work with them to observe the transactions of citizens. To…