Chinese President: Blockchain Reshaping Global Economic Structure

01/06/2018

Speaking at the nineteenth annual conference of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese President Xi Jinping mentioned blockchain as one of the technologies that are making economic breakthroughs.

On his speech, the President openly praised blockchain technology, as the technology continues to cement itself in the country’s future plans.

"Since entering the 21st century, global scientific and technological innovation has entered an unprecedented period of intensive activity. A new round of scientific and technological revolutions and industrial changes are reconstructing the global innovation map and reshaping the global economic structure."

"The new generation of information technology represented by artificial intelligence, quantum information, mobile communication, internet of things, and blockchain accelerate the breakthrough in application and bred new life science fields represented by synthetic biology, gene editing, brain science, and regenerative medicine."

President of the People's Republic of China, Xi Jinping

Xi also emphasized the need for China to focus on this technological development in order for it to become the global center of science and innovation.

Bitcoin is the first and also the most well-known application of blockchain. The technology eliminates the need for a third-parties, such as a bank, by creating a secure and permanent record of transactions between two parties.

While Beijing has domestically halted bitcoin trading and banned the sales of new digital tokens through the "initial coin offering" process, the country has become one of the hub of activity for blockchain development. China has seen an exponential rise in the number of blockchain startups, with at least 100 startups emerging just in 2017. Nearly half of the country’s publicly listed banks have utilized blockchain technology.

China has been long known to replace dominant platforms and companies, such as Google, Facebook and YouTube, with local platforms such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and others.

Xi did not detail how blockchain should be utilized, but his comment solidifies the Chinese government’s approach on blockchain, and not bitcoin. This comes just days after the Chinese government's central administrative branch also mentioned blockchain in a top-level missive.

This shows how the Chinese government in wanting to remain at the forefront of IT and other technologies in a race to lead the global market.