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

(Source: Economic Daily)

Reprinted from: Economic Daily

On March 17, the People’s Bank of China Jiangsu Branch released a report on the progress of digital renminbi in promoting 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 “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 currency coupons and red envelopes, covering over 200,000 merchants, involving more than 2 million participants, and 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 and leisure, dining and accommodation, and sports events. For example, Changzhou launched digital renminbi discounts for green travel; Wuxi and Nantong relied on commercial districts and scenic spots to create digital renminbi consumption clusters; several cities launched consumption activities linked with “Suzhou Super” events. Additionally, by the end of 2025, the province will have initially established 150 digital renminbi application clusters, 80 characteristic villages and towns, and 300 “15-minute convenient service circles,” forming diversified digital renminbi consumption scenarios.

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

Reviewing the progress, several pilot cities for digital renminbi have successively released relevant “performance reports” this year. 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, and the trend of differentiated layout and coordinated development of digital renminbi is becoming increasingly prominent.

For example, Fujian Province’s digital renminbi pilot work has achieved “expansion, increase, and improvement.” By the end of 2025, the province had opened 13.2599 million digital wallets, with 247 million transactions totaling 728.023 billion yuan. In 2025 alone, the transaction volume reached 2.23395 trillion yuan, a new high since the pilot started, with 766,700 merchants accepting digital renminbi payments. The province was the first in the country to realize full-scenario digital renminbi tax payments, with a total tax payment of nearly 80 billion yuan, promoting 466 municipal budget units in Fuzhou to use digital renminbi for subsidies, fiscal rewards, and daily expenses. It also supported prepayment fund supervision in education and training, with over 110 off-campus training institutions implementing smart contracts for digital renminbi, and nearly 80% coverage in subject-based training institutions within Fuzhou.

In 2025, Shenzhen launched a cultural and tourism card with integrated hardware wallet functions at the China International Fair for Investment and Trade, and the digital renminbi hardware wallet self-service terminals made their first appearance at the APEC informal senior officials’ meeting, achieving a one-stop experience for “digital currency + finance + events” and “digital currency + finance + conferences.” The “Digital Currency Bridge” has paved the way for enterprises going global, 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 stated that broad scene penetration, mature technological applications, continuous product innovation, and increasing user acceptance are the main features.

Professor Tian Lihui of Nankai University’s Finance Department analyzed that the “performance reports” from multiple pilot regions show three major 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 fields like 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.