China City to Pay Salaries ‘100%’ in Digital Yuan – Is CBDC Adoption Accelerating?
A Chinese city wants to pull of a world’s first – by becoming the first city to pay its employees entirely in a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The move would be a massive breakthrough for the central People’s Bank of China (PBoC) and its digital yuan token.
The Shenzhen Securities Times reported that Changshu, in Jiangsu Province in Eastern China, wants to pay “all of the wages” of both “public officials and the employees of state-owned enterprises” using the CBDC from next month.
Changshu is a satellite city near Suzhou, a much larger urban settlement with some 11 million residents.
Around 1.5 million people live in Changshu.
And it is expected that if all goes to plan in the city, other parts of the pilot will follow suit.
City authorities also announced that not only civil servants would receive their salaries in digital yuan, but also all “personnel working in state-run institutions, such as public hospitals.”
The digital yuan is already accepted as a payment tool in millions of stores and outlets throughout the fast-growing pilot zone.
It is also widely used as a payment option in transport networks, as well as toll booths thoughout the nation.
It can also be used at most major online outlets, including the Tencent and WeChat ecosystems, JD.com (China’s answer to Amazon), and Alibaba-related companies.
Public sector workers have thus far been the first to get hands-on experience with new CBDC usage cases.
In the early stages of the pilot, public sector workers in selected cities were asked to use the coin to pay their public transport fees.
This first manifested itself on public buses.
But it has since been expanded to cover entire city-wide metro networks.
And Suzhou has often found itself at the heart of developments.
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