LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's intelligence chief Jeremy Fleming will warn that China is learning the lessons of the Russia-Ukraine war and may use a centralized digital currency to avoid future sanctions.
October 11, 2022
Jeremy Fleming, director of GCHQ, will use Tuesday's speech in London to argue that the Chinese leadership is using its "financial and scientific prowess" to manipulate strategically important technologies as a way to control The means of business and ordinary people. He will use China's currency as an example to illustrate this coercion.
Digital currencies “introduce efficiencies and new settlement methods, but are implemented in a way that can monitor citizens and force businesses to use the service,” Jeremy Fleming will say.
"In the future, it may also enable China to partially evade the international sanctions currently being under the Putin regime in Russia."
China is the global leader in launching a central bank digital currency, and is piloting a digital yuan in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. The People's Bank of China said it "takes the protection of personal information and privacy very seriously."
The digital yuan is still in its early stages, and according to the latest data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the yuan itself is still eclipsed by the U.S. dollar, accounting for 4% of the global foreign exchange market, compared with 88% in the United States.
