Image Source : China Visual

BEIJING, February 3 (TMTPOST) —— The provincial government in Jiangsu, a manufacturing hub in eastern China, laid out new goals to popularize digital RMB in a document released on Friday. 

In the document, the government plans to explore the application of digital RMB in fund collection and payment of financial budget units and state-owned enterprises and institutions, focusing on financial payment, government procurement, public resource trading, tax payment, social security, education and medical services, and other public areas.

The goal is to strive for covering important scenarios such as trade, people's livelihoods, culture and tourism, and other key fields by the end of 2023.  In addition, the Jiangsu government will endeavor to make notable progress in the number of digital RMB application scenarios, the number of users, and transaction scales by June 2025.

The People's Bank of China started researching digital currencies in 2014 and officially launched a pilot program in late 2019.  According to the latest data released by the Digital Currency Research Institute of the People's Bank of China, the pilot areas in 15 provinces had a total of 360 million transactions with a value of 10.04 billion yuan ($1.48 billion) as of August 31, 2022.

The digital RMB pilot areas were expanded to Guangdong, Jiangsu, Hebei, Sichuan, and Jinan in Shandong province, Kunming in Yunnan Province, and other places on December 16, 2022.

Popularizing the digital RMB and expanding the application scenarios have become the top priority of China.  A few days ago, the Beijing government held a conference on forming a new development pattern to expand digital RMB applications.  The Ministry of Commerce issued a pilot plan for boosting the opening up of the service industry in Wuhan, Hubei Province, aiming to include Wuhan in the digital RMB pilot areas.  Among all the piloted areas, only Jiangsu province has released such a detailed work plan.