As usual, there is so much you get right, but there is the part that is woefully wrong or incomplete and, in criticizing China’s motives, seems like the mote in your own eye.
I have been to all these cities and had the same reactions: they are amazing in what they show China has accomplished and, at the same time, I observed that many of the results are double-edged. I have personally experienced, as it were, both edges of the sword: When Shi jinping declared that China will lead in the development and uses of blockchain technology, shortly afterward, almost all decentralized platform projects in China and all cryptocurrencies and coin-funded projects were effectively illegalized and shutdown. Including my project.
The central purpose of China’s moving rapidly to create their own central-bank issued digital currency is the same dream of all other advocates of crypto worldwide: the desire to challenge the world’s liquid (“fiat”) currencies that are 100% constituted of currencies from western liberal democracies and, most of all, the US Dollar. The CPC and effectively all cryptocurrency advocates have the same objective: shake off the shackles of the international monetary system and be less subject to values and constraints of the western liberal democratic order such as transparency. In China’s case, this is most urgent in how these constraints apply for such political and economic undertakings as the Belt and Road initiative.
China can therefore have it both ways: they will have a freely floating (digital) currency to transact outside of the western liberal democratic order and they’ll have the renminbi. Ultimately, the crypto-renminbi will become –again as BTC, ETH, etc. proponents would like — a tool of their own monetary and political order that will replace, most of all, the USD.
The political and policy implications of both the aspirants (CPC-crypto and BTC, etc.) will have one direct political effect: the values (putative or practiced) of western liberal democracy will be replace with….??
I have begun writing about my experiences in China along with the more general technological and the political issues of crypto and blockchain here on Medium. Feel free to read and challenge.
