Scenario Cultivation Shows Results: Multiple Regions Release Latest "Report Card" for Digital Yuan

Reprinted from: Securities Daily

On March 17, the People’s Bank of China Jiangsu Branch released a report on digital renminbi’s promotion of consumption. In terms of boosting total consumption, by 2025, Jiangsu Province will have held over 11,000 digital renminbi promotion activities, including distribution of consumption coupons, red envelopes, and national subsidies totaling about 350 million yuan through initiatives like “Suzhou New Consumption,” “Water Rhyme Jiangsu,” and old-for-new exchanges, directly driving residents’ spending of over 3.4 billion yuan. During the 2026 Spring Festival, efforts will continue with more than 1,100 activities, distributing about 36 million yuan in digital renminbi coupons and red envelopes, covering over 200,000 merchants and involving more than 2 million participants, stimulating nearly 500 million yuan in consumption.

In terms of consumption sectors, digital renminbi in Jiangsu has covered multiple areas such as supermarkets and retail, transportation, cultural tourism, dining and accommodation, and sports events. For example, Changzhou launched digital renminbi discounts for green travel; Wuxi and Nantong built digital renminbi consumption clusters around commercial districts and scenic spots; several cities launched consumption activities linked with “Suzhou Super” events. By the end of 2025, the province will have established about 150 digital renminbi application clusters, 80 characteristic villages and towns, and 300 “15-minute convenient service circles,” forming a diversified digital renminbi consumption scene.

Du Juan, senior researcher at the Bank of Jiangsu Research Institute, told reporters that the smart contract and traceability features of digital renminbi can precisely regulate the distribution of consumption incentives, prevent arbitrage and misappropriation, and improve fund utilization efficiency, playing an important role in promoting consumption in Jiangsu Province.

Reviewing recent developments, several pilot cities for digital renminbi have successively released related “performance reports.” The application scenarios of digital renminbi continue to expand, covering personal consumption, public transportation, cross-border applications, and corporate services. Each pilot city advances its work based on its own positioning, with a more distinct trend of differentiated layout and coordinated development of digital renminbi.

For example, Fujian Province’s digital renminbi pilot work has seen significant expansion, increase, and improvement. By the end of 2025, the province had opened 13.26 million digital wallets, with 247 million transactions totaling 728.023 billion yuan. In 2025 alone, transaction volume reached 223.395 billion yuan, a new high since the pilot started, with 766,700 merchants accepting digital renminbi payments. Fujian became the first in the country to realize full-scenario digital renminbi tax payments, with a total tax paid of nearly 80 billion yuan. It promoted the use of digital renminbi for subsidies, fiscal rewards, and daily expenses for 466 municipal budget units in Fuzhou. It also supported prepayment fund supervision in education and training, with over 110 off-campus training institutions implementing smart contracts, and nearly 80% coverage of subject-based training institutions in Fuzhou.

In 2025, Shenzhen launched a cultural and tourism card with integrated hardware wallet functions at the China International Fair for Investment & Trade, and the digital renminbi hardware wallet self-service terminals made their first appearance at the APEC informal senior officials’ meeting, providing a one-stop experience of “finance + events” and “finance + conferences.” The “Digital Currency Bridge” facilitates enterprises’ international expansion, with total business volume exceeding 20 billion yuan within the city.

Experts believe that the development characteristics of digital renminbi in pilot regions are distinct. Du Juan pointed out that broad scene penetration, mature technology application, continuous product innovation, and increasing user acceptance are the main features.

Tian Lihui, professor of finance at Nankai University, analyzed that the “performance reports” from multiple pilot regions show three main features: “differentiated deep cultivation,” “collaborative promotion,” and “efficiency-oriented transformation.” By 2026, digital renminbi will fully enter the “2.0 era,” with the core trend of “deep scene cultivation + ecological empowerment”: technologically, smart contracts, hardware wallets, and offline payments will be more maturely embedded in high-frequency livelihood scenarios; in application, prepayment fund supervision is expected to expand to healthcare and elderly care; at the cross-border level, multilateral central bank digital currency bridges will expand, significantly improving cross-border settlement efficiency. In the future, digital renminbi will become a strategic digital foundation to enhance fiscal efficiency, serve new productive forces, and strengthen the consumption safety net.

Editor: Liu Runrong