“The Chinese group Alibaba was awarded the contract for a major federal IT project two weeks ago. The fuss about the decision is premature.
The decision caused astonishment. Two weeks ago, the Federal Chancellery published the names of the companies on the Simap Internet platform that had received orders for a major federal IT project. This involves the outsourcing of data and applications to the public cloud.”
Read the full article @ NZZ (paywall):
“China’s “Sputnik Moment” is what Kai-Fu Lee, author of the famous book AI Superpowers, likes to call it. Five years ago, when AlphaGo—an artificial intelligence–based program developed by DeepMind, a startup that Google acquired in 2014—defeated two of the world’s best human exponents of the board game Go, it came as an eye-opener to China and its A.I. community.
Soon after, the Chinese government launched an ambitious Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan to build China’s A.I. ecosystem, promising policy support, central coordination, and investments that are slated to cross the $150 billion mark by 2030. The goal: China’s A.I. industry should generate 1 trillion yuan ($160 billion) of annual revenues, with related industries crossing 10 trillion yuan ($1.6 trillion) in annual sales, by the end of this decade.”
Read the full article @ Fortune:
“The government in Bern awards a major contract for cloud services to five companies. One of them: the Chinese provider Alibaba. Now one wonders in the country whether the data is safe there.”
Read the full article @ Süddeutsche Zeitung:
“China continues to expand the scope of its digital central bank currency (CBDC). Now you can pay for transport services with the digital yuan for the first time.
According to an official announcement on Wednesday, the Beijing subway launched a pilot program in which passengers can pay for the use of 24 subway lines and four subway stations with the digital yuan (e-CNY for short).
The new service is only available to customers with a bank account at the Chinese industrial and commercial bank. The big bank is involved in China’s CBDC testing. “You need to download a mobile app that is linked to your bank account to use the service,” said a spokesman for the Beijing Railway Network.”
Read the full article @ Cointelegraph:
“Hong Kong’s finance minister firmly spoke of the need for digital transformation and confirmed that the region will conduct technical tests on China’s digital central bank currency (CBDC) in the form of a digital yuan in 2022.
Hong Kong Finance Minister Paul Chan Mo-po said in an essay posted on the ministry’s website on June 27 that the organization would begin technical testing of the digital yuan. Guided by the idea of “keeping up with the times”, Mo-po began his essay by saying that he was aware of how enthusiastically the Chinese public used consumer vouchers and discounts with e-wallets. This motivated him to reflect on the impact of the digital yuan, which he believes will increase the public’s interest in digital systems, as mentioned earlier.“”
Read the full article @ Crypto Valley Journal:
“China is making progress in testing its central bank digital currency (CBDC) and introducing blockchain payments for the first time to get your salary in digital yuan.
According to the official website of the Xiong’an New Area, the Chinese central bank PBoC has paid out wages on-chain in digital yuan for the first time.
On Saturday, Xiong’an authorities said the pilot project was led by the Shijiazhuang-based PBoC branch and supported by the Bank of China Hebei in Xiong’an and the National Development and Reform Commission.”
Read the full article @ Cointelegraph:
“As China moves closer to rolling out the world’s first major sovereign digital currency, speculation over the global implications has reached a fever pitch.
Historian Niall Ferguson is calling the digital yuan a “potentially fatal challenge” to decades of American financial hegemony. Franklin Templeton’s Michael Hasenstab says it could undermine the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. Joe Biden’s White House is studying the potential threat to U.S. interests.
Yet talk to people who’ve actually used the digital yuan in China, and you’re more likely to get a different response: shrugs of indifference.
In Shenzhen, the high-tech metropolis that just extended China’s largest digital yuan trial, participants interviewed by Bloomberg showed little interest in switching from mobile payment systems run by Ant Group Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. that have already replaced cash in much of the country. Some balked at the possibility a digital yuan might give authorities easier access to real-time data on their financial lives.”
Read the full article @ Bloomberg:
“When Chinese AI unicorns SenseTime, Megvii and Yitu were sanctioned by the US in October last year, it looked like a major threat to the survival of their business.
Yet the supply chain impact of being added to Washington’s Entity List, which restricted their access to American products, has been less significant than originally feared. In fact, it was quickly overshadowed by the need to diversify a business model overly reliant on government orders for surveillance cameras in a market that has since become saturated.”
Read the full article @ The Star:
“The U.S. and China are battling for global supremacy in artificial intelligence. Amid the pandemic, China may have taken the lead.
“Data is what drives A.I., and China has more data than anyone else,” Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Chinese venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures and author of AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, said at the Fortune Global Forum on Tuesday.”
Read the full article @ Fortune (paywall):
“The ‘interoperability’ of the digital yuan with international payment systems and other central bank digital currencies will determine its use abroad.
There is a sense of urgency to promote greater use of the yuan to help China offset threat of worst-case US sanctions that could cut it off from dollar payment system.”
Read the full article @ SCMP:
“The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated China’s collection of big data, especially for contact tracing. Posts on Weibo claimed that WeChat Pay and Alipay helped identify people who had visited Beijing’s Xinfadi market using their payment data.”
Full article @ SCMP:
“China is opening its financial market a little further. American Express is the first non-Chinese provider to process card payments.”
Read the full article @ Die Zeit:
“Over the last few months, COVID-19 has spread across the world, uniting humanity in a shared experience that has highlighted the vulnerability of our societies. As the first country to grapple with the crisis, China has been on the frontlines both of post-COVID-19 economic recovery, and of the societal changes the pandemic has precipitated. Efforts to stabilize the domestic economy are already well underway, and though China’s first-quarter gross domestic product declined 6.8 percent over the previous year, according to government statistics, our simulations suggest that economic activity may have bottomed out in the first quarter.
As that recovery takes shape, several important shifts in the make-up of China’s economic landscape have already become apparent. COVID-19 has accelerated pre-existing trends, ushering in the arrival of a future we were likely already on track to realize. In this report, we discuss five trends shaping the Chinese economy that have been accelerated, or “fast forwarded,” as a result of the onset of the COVID-19 crisis (Exhibit 1).”
Read the full report @ McKinsey:
“As China is moving forward with blockchain projects amid the COVID-19 crisis, the government has tapped another tech partnership to continue the development of China’s digital yuan.
Domestic artificial intelligence (AI) startup SenseTime has partnered with the People’s Bank of China’s (PBoC) Digital Currency Research Institute to provide its AI expertise amid the reported trials of the central bank’s digital currency (CBDC).”
Read the full article @ Cointelegraph:
“Bank of China launched its first fintech innovation regulatory pilot project in Beijing last year. The bank announced plans to expand its regulatory pilot projects in six more cities and districts on April 27.
The bank plans to conduct pilot projects in Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Hebei Xiong’an New District, Hangzhou and Suzhou. Ultimately, it aims to improve the financial services in general for the real economy.”
Read the full article @ Cointelegraph:
““Initially I thought blockchain, especially distributed ledger technology [DLT], had no commercial value because it was too expensive,” said Yifan He, CEO of Beijing Red Date Technology. “Then I realized we can actually build a multi-framework platform to reduce the cost for everyone.”
That realization is a core idea of the Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN), a government-supported initiative scheduled to open for global commercial use Saturday. As the only one of the three original founding companies with a specialized software background, Red Date initiated the project and has been spearheading the network’s technical design.
“I think nobody has ever heard of it. But actually, in many ways, Red Date Technology plays a critical role in the development of BSN because they are the one who architected the BSN,“ said Michael Sung, a professor at Fudan University’s Fanhai International School of Finance. “They are the one who actually created the technology strategy which went up to the [National] Development and Reform Commission. They made that happen.””
Read the full article @ coindesk:
“Yesterday, China’s Ping An Insurance announced it has set up Ping An Consumer Finance in Shanghai with a registered capital of RMB 5 billion ($700 million). The new company has been established under Ping An’s ‘finance+technology’ strategy and incorporates the Group’s expertise in AI, blockchain and cloud computing.
Ping An said its technology system would underpin the entire consumer finance business, including customer acquisition, product innovation, credit review, risk management, post-lending management and customer service. The goal is to create synergy between other group companies and form a closed-loop financial system.
[…]
Ping An has a significant presence in the blockchain space, with 68 blockchain patents. It also has 679 AI patents and 48 in cloud computing. OneConnect Financial, an AI and blockchain offshoot from the group, went public on the New York stock exchange last year.”
Read the full article @ Ledger Insights:
This week, China will officially launch a major new blockchain initiative called the Blockchain-based Services Network (BSN). The BSN is a critical part of China’s national blockchain strategy that was announced by President Xi in late November 2019, but went largely under the radar as the simultaneous announcement of China’s digital RMB currency, called the DCEP, swept the world by storm. Only recently has the Western media recognized the significance of the BSN, which sees its mainland commercial launch April 25. The portal’s global commercial launch is scheduled for June 25.
Essentially, the BSN will be the backbone infrastructure technology for massive interconnectivity throughout the mainland, from city governments, to companies and individuals alike. The network will also form the backbone to the Digital Silk Road to provide interconnectivity to all of China’s trade partners around the globe. The BSN will be a new internet protocol to allow a more efficient way to share data, value and digital assets in a completely transparent and trusted way between anyone who wants to be a node on the network.
The main BSN founding consortia partners are the State Information Center (China’s top-level government policy and strategy think tank affiliated with the National Development and Reform Commission), China Mobile (China’s largest national telecom with over 900 million subscribers), China Unionpay (the world’s top payment and settlement provider with eight billion issued credit cards), and Red Date Technologies (the main blockchain architect for the BSN).
Read the full article @ coindesk:
“Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (BABA.N) said it will invest 200 billion yuan ($28 billion) in its cloud infrastructure over three years – a plan that follows a boom in demand for business software as the coronavirus outbreak peaked in China.
The company said in a statement it will spend the funds on semiconductor and operating system development as well as building out its data centre infrastructure.”
Read the full article @ Reuters:
“Milestone for world’s biggest central banks in path toward launching electronic payment system. China’s central bank has introduced a homegrown digital currency across four cities as part of a pilot program, marking a milestone on the path toward the first electronic payment system by a major central bank.”
Read the full article @ Wall Street Journal:
