WeChat, China’s Twitter-like social media app, announced on April 6 that it has embraced digital Chinese yuan in certain pilot regions as part of its intensified cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In recent years WeChat has increasingly become the regime’s tool for monitoring citizens, censoring speech, and clamping down on dissidents.
Digital Chinese yuan, or digital RMB (renminbi), or e-CNY, is a visual currency issued by China’s Central Bank that is run by designated operators and is equivalent to other forms of Chinese Yuan.
The digital RMB will penetrate Chinese people’s daily lives as the pilot program covers more regions and business areas in the future, Zou said.
Opening a digital wallet requires verifying the user’s identity in different ways, “it may use passport numbers, fingerprints, and other identifiers to open digital wallets in the future, besides the cell phone number,” Mu Changchun, director of the Institute of Digital Currency of the Central Bank, said in November 2020. In China, cell phone users must register with their personal data to access telecommunication services.
Collecting such information makes surveillance of citizens’ private data easier.
The first batch of pilot cities for digital RMB was defined in April 2020 by the Central Bank, it included the cities of Shenzhen, Chengdu, Suzhou, and Xiongan. Subsequently, in October of the same year, Shanghai, Changsha, Xi’an, Qingdao, and Dalian were added to the list, along with venues for the Winter Olympics, forming the “10+1” pilot areas.
China Using Digital RMB to ‘Oversee’
Lu Tianming, a China affairs observer based in the United States, told The Epoch Time on April 9 that the CCP steps up efforts on Digital RMB in the hope of being able to oversee citizens.
According to Lu, the CCP can use anything to strengthen its totalitarian rule and monitor the country. Similarly, the digital yuan will be used to control and monitor capital and consumer flows.
Digital RMB might facilitate the CCP’s persecution of people. Lu said: “The CCP won’t even need to go in and raid homes, it just locks up all the money online so that citizens can’t spend it. In this case, the police won’t need to go to the door to achieve this effect.
“The Chinese people may say digital RMB is so convenient, but when something really happens, they will experience the very scary and evil side of this totalitarian rule,” Lu added.
Ho-Fung Hung, the Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, shares this view. He published an article on Sep. 9, 2020, on Radio Free Asia (rfa.com), saying that the CCP spared no effort in introducing the digital RMB and will eventually replace the physical currency so it can easily control people’s electronic transactions and currency exchange movements.
Regarding the essential difference between electronic and physical money, according to Hung, the physical currency user can always turn the balance into banknotes from a bank account, even taking money out of their WeChat or Alipay wallets by connecting to their bank accounts. But users of electronic money might not sell their digital currency for paper money.
“The government, by monitoring all economic transactions through electronic money, is in control of everyone’s every move and activity, and is ready to raid anyone’s home,” Hung wrote.
WeChat, Tencent, and the CCP
WeChat Pay, owned by Chinese Internet company Tencent, and Alipay, operated by Alibaba’s Ant Group, are the most popular mobile payment methods in China, both companies have launched digital RMB wallets.
Since February 2018, Tencent has been involved in the Digital RMB project as the designated operator of the Central Bank, including design, R&D, and operation.
The article reveals how Tencent, China’s tech giant, runs its business under the control of the CCP: the vice president in charge of the Tencent portal site is also the deputy secretary of the company’s party committee. That is, Tencent.com, as well as instant messaging software like QQ and WeChat developed by Tencent, all spread the voice of the CCP.
The Tencent network information review team is also led by the Party’s deputy secretary, with 80 percent of the team members being CCP cadres. The team is responsible for guiding the direction of public opinion and conducting technical analysis of information reported by netizens.
WeChat Is a CCP Surveillance Tool
With Tencent linked to the CCP, WeChat became one of the most powerful tools for monitoring the public, censoring speech, and punishing dissidents.
A widely known example is the first disclosure of the CCP virus (COVID-19) by Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Li alerted his friends and classmates in his WeChat circle of friends to COVID-19 in late 2019, and was then targeted by the police. Eventually, he died of the disease.
There are also people in Shanghai and other cities who have been warned or arrested for using WeChat to contact and send messages about their living difficulties amid the CCP’s Covid lockdown measures.
In May 2020, more than 300 Falun Gong adherents in a WeChat group were raided and kidnapped, reported the Minghui website on July 30, 2020. It is rare for so many people to be arrested at the same time across the country.
Another case reported by Minghui on July 15, 2020, was that of Wang Bin, a Falun Gong follower in Jiangmen, Guangdong Province, who was sentenced to eight years in prison and fined 30,000 yuan (approximately $4,713) for registering a WeChat number on his cell phone, setting up a chat group, and sending a message.
