China Moves to Dominate the Blockchain Industry With President Xi Jinping’s Backing

China, Asia’s largest economy and the second-largest in the world is making swift moves to position itself as a leader in the blockchain industry. Currently, China holds the most number of blockchain patents with second being the United States.

Speaking to the CNBC, some experts from the blockchain industry said that china will be taking a leading  position as it has solid backing from President Xi Jinping. China understands the fact that to establish itself as the world leader and scale above its economic rival, the U.S, it has to lead its way in the next technological revolution.

In October 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for the need of accelerated development in the field of blockchain. “We must take the blockchain as an important breakthrough for independent innovation of core technologies. [We must] clarify the main direction, increase investment, focus on a number of key core technologies, and accelerate the development of blockchain technology and industrial innovation,” he said.

The blockchain technology also often called as the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) got popular after Bitcoin came into existence in 2009. Over the last few years, the blockchain technology has found its application across multiple industries like financial banking, trade, aviation industry, supply chain and management, agriculture industry, and several others.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that his country must seize the opportunities in blockchain and establish itself as a world leader in offering blockchain solutions to different parts of the world.

On the other hand, China’s central bank - People’s Bank of India - is accelerating the development for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) dubbed as the Digital Yuan. Note that China has put an absolute ban on public cryptocurrencies since 2017.

However, with the global developments of stablecoins, especially after Facebook announced its Libra cryptocurrency, China saw a threat to its financial stability by external stablecoins.

Thus, it has decided to pursue its CBDC plans to maintain an economic stronghold even during these changing times of global currency adoption.

Chinese technology giants like Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, and other have already started experimenting the use of blockchain. Besides, many other business are getting a major push and incentives from the government to proceed ahead with their blockchain plans.