China charges ahead with national digital currency
Nathaniel Popper and Cao Li
Mar 2, 2021 – 1.34pm
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Annabelle Huang recently won a government lottery to try China’s latest economics experiment: a national digital currency.
After joining the lottery through the social media app WeChat, Huang, 28, a business strategist in Shenzhen, received a digital envelope with 200 electronic Chinese yuan, or eCNY, worth about $30.
To spend it, she went to a convenience store near her office and picked out some nuts and yoghurt. Then she pulled up a QR code for the digital currency from inside her bank app, which the store scanned for payment.
Annabelle Huang recently won a government lottery to try China’s latest economics experiment: a national digital currency. After joining the lottery through the social media app WeChat, Huang, 28, a business strategist in Shenzhen, received a digital envelope with 200 electronic Chinese yuan, or eCNY, worth around $30. To spend it, she went to a convenience store near her office and picked out some nuts and yogurt. Then she pulled up a QR code for the digital currency from inside her bank app, which the store scanned for payment. “The journey of how you pay, it’s very similar” to that of other Chinese payments apps, Huang said of the eCNY experience, though she added that it was not quite as smooth. China has charged ahead with a bold effort to remake the way that government-backed money works, rolling out its own digital currency with different qualities than cash or digital deposits. The country’s central bank, which began testing eCNY last year in four cities, recently exp