At the Beijing Winter Olympic Games, China is rolling out its digital currency, the e-CNY, for the first time to foreigners.
Nobody should want to attend the Winter Games given the genocide. But if you were forced to go, then you would have the option of prepaying a credit card with digital Chinese yuan loaded for touchless payments. Or you could buy the more gimmicky versions, with payment chips embedded in ski gloves or a panda soft toy. You can now buy your hot chocolate without freezing your hand first by removing your glove to dig into your pockets for change.
This is progress, apparently. It’s at times like these that one appreciates the supposed innovations of dictatorship. But for those droids always looking for the next greatest and latest, wrist implantable e-CNY isn’t yet available.
Forgotten by most are the wearable payment methods that Visa promoted during the 2018 Winter Games.
E-CNY is a digital currency, like Bitcoin, which is illegal in China. Beijing doesn’t want the competition, and Bitcoin, along with other cryptocurrencies, is just too easy to spend on illegal things. Crypto is relatively anonymous for users, which is ideal for criminals. In China, that likely includes you if you want your money out of the country or have any ideas that aren’t in concert with Xi Jinping Thought.
E-CNY is unlike other cryptocurrencies because it’s tightly controlled, monitored, and transparent to the regime. The state knows exactly what you’re spending and where you’re spending it at every moment of the day.
The regime would eventually like e-CNY to be a global currency, trusted by all because all trust the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But that’s tough, given Beijing’s repeated broken promises, including in the e-CNY’s first rollout to international consumers.
Visa, the credit card company, has long had exclusive rights in the electronic payments category at the Olympics. It’s one of only 13 main sponsors of the Games that likely collectively paid more than $1 billion for what amounts to advertising rights for the 2022 and 2024 Games.
Mastercard and American Express aren’t allowed to be used for payments at the Games as a result. Neither should e-CNY or China’s state-owned UnionPay mobile app. But in Beijing, the CCP can be very persuasive. After all, it has the guns and a Maoist philosophy that power grows from their barrels. So companies tend to believe that when in Beijing, do as the Beijingers.
Way to play the COVID-19 card against Visa. One wonders why Visa’s contactless forms of payment aren’t around four years after Pyeongchang. Why is the e-CNY panda getting all the credit?
The e-CNY is particularly focused on expansion in China. The utilization of e-CNY at the Games “paves the way for a further large-scale national rollout and cross-border application,” according to Global Times.
When e-CNY started splashing its logo around the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Visa apparently thought the better part of discretion was to not complain publicly, despite the fact that it conflicted with their exclusivity agreement. That also makes sense from a public relations perspective: first, because Visa doesn’t much want to associate with the “Genocide Games” and second, because it doesn’t want the public in China—or, more importantly, the regime—to be angered by a commercial dispute. Visa wants to grow its business in China, and getting into a fight over e-CNY is the best way to jeopardize that goal.
So yet again, the CCP and its favored businesses get away with murder. At the Olympic Games, there’s yet more blood on Beijing’s fake snow.