China’s Digital Yuan: Analysis and Opportunities for the Greater Bay Area
University of Saint Joseph
A Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is a new form of central bank money accessible to the public, accepted as a means of payment, legal tender, safe store of value by all citizens, businesses, and government agencies. Undoubtedly, the pandemic has turbocharged a global financial technology revolution.
Central bank digital currencies have been referred to as “the future of payments”, or even “the future of money”, and not without reason.
Departing from my previous work on the early Americans in Macau, published in 2004, this lecture adds some preliminary results of ongoing comparative research regarding all foreigners living in Macau from the late eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and aims to achieve a numeric global picture of such individuals and their representativeness in the city.
The Digital Yuan is a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), and CBDCs are not cryptocurrencies, even though there is of course some relation between both categories.
In April 2020, after several years of work (the research commenced in 2014), the Chinese Government announced the starting of the tests of the country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), DCEP (Digital Currency Electronic Payment) or Digital Yuan, with the aim of deploying it massively in China by the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.
Thus far, the tests in the Mainland have proven to be very successful.
Even though, according to a report published by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in early 2020, 80% of Central Banks in the world are currently working on CBDCs (some are just at an initial research stage, though), Asia seems to be the place where CBDCs arouse more interest. In this sense, the major economy leading the CBDC race in Asia (and in the whole world) is China.
In this seminar, I will analyze what opportunities the Digital Yuan will offer to Mainland China, but also to Macau and to the rest of the Greater Bay Area.
Date: Friday, 26 November 2021
Time: 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Location: 18th Floor Residential Hall, USJ Ilha Verde Campus