

In May 2021 it was also announced that the e-CNY would be integrated into Alibaba’s services ecosystem. This pilot program has since gradually been expanded through invites and cash incentives to eventually reach 140 million registered users by October 2021, according to the PBOC. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), China’s central bank, first began trialing the e-CNY app in April 2020 when it launched internal testing in four cities. With over 1.2 billion users, of which around 750 million are active on a daily basis, this development could give significant exposure to the e-CNY, which some analysts say faces stiff competition from other online payment platforms – including WeChat itself. WeChat has a reputation for being heavily monitored, despite Tencent’s attempts to convince users to “rest assured, respecting user privacy has always been one of WeChat’s most important principles.” But even if the company says otherwise, on a technical level, it doesn’t offer users much protection against government surveillance. In addition to WeChat’s close ties with the Chinese government, WeChat also states in its privacy policy that it may retain user data for “as long as is necessary” to “comply with applicable laws and regulations.” In a since-deleted social media post in January, WeChat denied that the app was storing user chats in response to businessman Li Shufu’s comments that Tencent CEO Ma Huateng “must be watching all our WeChats every day.” On April 7, 2022, Tencent announced that it will now enable users to use the digital yuan as a payment option on its social media and payment app WeChat in the 23 pilot regions listed above. Zhangjiakou, Hebei province (Winter Olympics and Paralympics sites).Beijing (Winter Olympics and Paralympics sites).Users can set up multiple digital wallets on the app and set parameters, such as daily spend limits and the apps and services that can be paid for with the wallet, and link different bank cards.įoreigners are currently only able to access limited functions in the digital yuan app as a Chinese identity card is required for some of the ‘higher-level’ wallet options (those that permit higher spending limits). The digital yuan app is the primary means through which users can use e-CNY. It is accessed through the digital yuan app 数字人民币 shuzi renminbi. The digital wallet, called the 数字钱包 shuzi qianbao in Chinese, is an online wallet through which you can keep track of and store e-CNY. How does the digital yuan app and digital wallet work?

Let’s say you happen to be singing songs at 2 am in downtown Shanghai.Ĭhinese bank account in order to top up the digital wallet with these two options. This continues on to any interaction with the smart world of China. If you are buying a potato at the side of the road in a very remote area in China, you would open your phone, scan the potato carts QR code, accept the amount and off you go. If you use any messaging app, while replying to your friend, on the right top corner of your screen you can scan or be scanned to quickly pay for items, anywhere. The most commonly used would be WeChat, as it doubles as the most used messaging app in China. In China, there are two methods of storing/saving your hard-earned finances, WeChat and Alipay. If you have read any articles about China in the last few years, you would have heard that cash is dead or dying. “The shocking piece is that China is exporting that kind of censorship to other parts of the world.”Īccording to the Citizen Lab, an Internet watchdog group at the University of Toronto, WeChat’s parent company Tencent created an extraordinarily advanced censorship algorithm to automatically identify combinations of keywords in messages and online articles that it then blocks. “It isn’t shocking that China has that kind of censorship,” he says.
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He declined to share his full name because he fears his criticism could draw retaliation against himself or his family by the authorities in China, where he travels often and where most of his family lives.
