A short infrastructural history of currency digitalization in the People’s Republic of China, 2000s-2020s

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This chapter offers a concise overview of China's endeavors towards establishing a state-backeddigital currency from the early 2000s to the present, culminating in the digital yuan.Drawing on the social scientific literature concerned with large technical systems, we asserttwo main arguments. First of all, while many commentators have considered that the newpayment infrastructure could overhaul the existing institutional arrangements in the realm ofpayments and in particular weaken private financial entities, its evolution actually follows amuch more incremental logic and relies on both private and public institutions. Secondly, manyforeign observers have assumed that the digital yuan represents a long-planned attempt atchallenging the international currency hierarchy and American international hegemony.Contrary to this line of thinking, we argue that initially, currency digitalization in the PRC wasfirst and foremost motivated by domestic factors. The project assumed an openly internationaldimension only after other foreign countries began to initiate their own attempts at currencydigitalization under the new slogan of developing "Central Bank Digital Currencies".