China CBDC Tracker

China is currently considered to be in the launch phase. China’s CBDC (referred to as the e-CNY, digital yuan, or digital renminbi) is often described as being in the pilot stage, but this description is misleading. Where most countries use terms like “pilot,” “proof-of-concept,” or “experiment” to describe CBDCs tested in closed environments, the People’s Bank of China uses this term to describe a CBDC that is largely open to the public in comparison. For example, in 2022, it was reported that over 260 million CBDC wallets were opened in China.

CBDC History and Development

China may have the longest-running CBDC research program. In 2014, the People’s Bank of China set up “a task force to study digital fiat currency.” In 2016, the People’s Bank of China expanded its efforts by establishing the Digital Currency Research Institute (sometimes referred to as the Digital Currency Institute or Digital Currency Research Lab) and building a “concept prototype of China’s first-generation digital fiat currency.” At the end of 2017, the project was expanded, and major financial institutions were brought in for further research and development.

In November 2019, the People’s Bank of China issued a press release to notify the public that, despite suggestions otherwise, it had not yet launched a CBDC. The central bank was “still in the research and testing phase.” The announcement was made in response to news that people were using the central bank’s likeness without permission to promote pyramid schemes.

By the end of 2019, the People’s Bank of China started what it was calling a CBDC pilot in four Chinese cities: Shenzhen, Suzhou, Xiong’an, and Chengdu. Citizens in the four selected cities gained access to the CBDC through a lottery system. For example, in Shenzhen, $1.5 million in CBDC was given to 50,000 participants to spend at 3,389 locations. Over 1.91 million people applied to be a part of the program. Similarly, in Suzhou, $3.1 million in CBDC was given to 100,000 participants. Money received in the lottery, however, had to be spent within a limited time frame or it would expire.

In 2020, access to the CBDC had been expanded to Shanghai, Hainan, Changsha, Xi’an, Qingdao, and Dalian. It would be expanded again in 2021 to the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, and China’s central, western, northeastern and northwestern regions.

In February 2021, the People’s Bank of China officially announced its participation in Project mBridge alongside the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, and the Bank for International Settlements. As stated by the People’s Bank of China, “The project will further explore the capabilities of distributed ledger technology (DLT) by developing a proof-of-concept prototype to enable real-time cross-border payment-versus-payment transactions of CBDC pairs on a 24/7 basis and facilitate the exchange between domestic and foreign currencies in cross-border trades.”

In July 2021, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China announced that access to the CBDC would be further expanded and the “next key trial will be the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympic Games in February 2022.” This announcement was made alongside the release of the central bank’s report titled “Progress of Research and Development of e-CNY in China” (The State Council also published a list of key findings from the report). The report stated that the goal of the Chinese CBDC should be to replace cash, improve financial inclusion, and improve cross-border payments. To achieve these goals, the paper said that a Chinese CBDC should comply with anti-money laundering regulations, be programmable, earn no interest, and have the flexibility to be changed in the future. The report also claimed that more than 20.87 million personal wallets and 3.51 million corporate wallets had been used to spend 34.5 billion yuan ($4.76 billion) across 70.75 million transactions as of June 2021. By the end of 2021, it was reported that there were 261 million users in the pilot that collectively made 87.6 billion yuan ($13.8 billion) worth of transactions with 8 million merchants.

People’s Bank of China governor Yi Gang offered a brief update on the CBDC’s progress in November 2021. He explained that the CBDC has been designed to limit its negative impacts on the existing financial system. In practice, that has meant limiting how much CBDC a person may own and spend. On the topic of surveillance, he said, “It is an international consensus that CBDCs cannot be completely anonymous.” Finally, he noted that the People’s Bank of China planned to collaborate further with other central bankers to figure out additional cross-borders applications.

On March 31, 2022, the People’s Bank of China expanded access to its CBDC to Tianjin, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and six cities in the province of Zhejiang. With this expansion also came a flurry of lotteries, discounts, and other promotions to attract adoption. By the end of the year, there was reportedly 13.61 billion yuan ($1.81 billion) in circulation. However, by December 2022, a former People’s Bank of China research director said, “The results are not ideal … usage has been low, highly inactive.”

In October 2022, People’s Bank of China deputy governor Fan Yifei shared a few thoughts on CBDC operations. Deputy governor Fan ultimately came to the conclusion that a two-tier system “allows more effective exploitation of existing business resources, human resources and technologies, promoting innovation and competition through market-driven development.” He further said that having the central bank rebuild the financial system from scratch “would be a tremendous waste” and an “unrealistic” expectation. However, he still maintained that the central bank must maintain “centralized management” and have sole access to transaction data.

In 2024, reports emerged that the CBDC was rarely used in practice. Despite government employees receiving their salary in the CBDC, they would transfer their balances to their traditional bank accounts. For example, one participant said, “I prefer not to keep the money in the e-CNY app, because there’s no interest if I leave it there. There are also not so many places, online or offline, where I can use the e-yuan.”

In September 2024, People’s Bank of China deputy governor Lu Lei reportedly said there had been a total of 7 trillion yuan ($982 billion) transactions using the CBDC. While not explicitly clear, this number appears to be the total for the past four years.

Yao Qian, former head of the People’s Bank of China’s Digital Currency Research Institute, was removed from office and the Chinese Communist Party in November 2024 for allegedly engaging in corruption. State-owned media reported that he “betrayed his original mission” and “spared no effort to support specific technology service providers for his own selfishness.”

Human Rights and Civil Liberties Concerns

China is riddled with major abuses of human rights and civil liberties. The U.S. Department of State reported significant human rights issues spanning genocide, arbitrary imprisonment, forced sterilization, extrajudicial internment camps, restrictions on expression, surveillance, and much more. Because violations are so widespread, the considerations of the risk a CBDC could pose will be conceptualized within the risks to financial privacy and financial freedom. A CBDC could be used to worsen all of these issues.

Financial privacy is immensely important for the protection of human rights and civil liberties because financial transactions reveal people’s professions, relationships, religion, political ideals, and more. The Chinese government has used the financial system as a tool for surveillance in targeting protestors so much that it was reported in 2019 that Hong Kong protestors were afraid to use metro cards out of fear they might be tracked. However, it’s not just protestors that fear being tracked. The ongoing genocide against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims is also a significant concern. In both cases, things could be made worse if a CBDC were implemented to give even greater financial surveillance and monitoring abilities to the Chinese Government.

Financial controls are also a significant risk. As explained by Freedom House, “China is home to one of the world’s most restrictive media environments and its most sophisticated system of censorship, particularly online.” In 2022, 43 journalists were imprisoned and in 2018, the social credit system was expanded to restrict the travel of millions of Chinese citizens. A CBDC could make matters worse by providing authorities the tools to further cut off journalists from society and choke off dissenting voices. Unfortunately, a CBDC could be used as another tool in this effort. Across the world, governments have often turned to freezing and seizing the money of activists, political rivals, and protestors to undermine the opposition. A CBDC would make such initiatives easier by allowing governments to take direct control of each citizen’s finances.

Despite efforts to severely punish corruption, “corruption remains rooted in the one-party system, which does not tolerate the institutions necessary for effectively addressing graft—such as a free press, independent civil society groups, and impartial courts.” That much is evident by the corruption immediately surrounding the creation of China’s CBDC. Yao Qian, former head of the People’s Bank of China’s Digital Currency Research Institute, was removed from the Chinese Communist Party in 2024 for allegedly engaging in corruption. State-owned media reported that he "betrayed his original mission” and “spared no effort to support specific technology service providers for his own selfishness.” The existence of pervasive corruption is a major concern with CBDCs because it calls into question any promises that might be made by the government to limit surveillance, control, or other risks of CBDCs. Furthermore, the existence of corruption calls into question whether CBDC policies might be designed to exert political favoritism through subsidies, price controls, or other targeted restrictions.

For additional information on concerns regarding violations of human rights and civil liberties, see the following reports by Amnesty International, Financial Tyranny Index, Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, Privacy International, and the U.S. Department of State. For additional information on concerns regarding the risks of CBDCs, see the following webpage and report by the Cato Institute: The Risks of CBDCs and Central Bank Digital Currency: Assessing the Risks and Dispelling the Myths.

For additional information regarding metrics, the methodology page explains each of the data points and provides their respective sources.