Digital yuan and payment apps Alipay and WeChat Pay are not competitors, China’s central bank says
- Digital wallets are the IT infrastructure that supports the use of the digital currency, PBOC official says
- Central bank is clarifying role of the digital currency, ‘which is a sovereign currency’, analyst says

China’s digital yuan and payment apps Alipay and WeChat Pay were not competitors, Mu Changchun, the director general of the digital currency research institute at the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), said on Friday.
“The digital currency [issued by the central bank] is money,” he told a panel discussion at the Lujiazui Forum in Shanghai. “Digital wallets are carriers that offer the IT infrastructure to support the use of this currency,” he said.

Mu was “clarifying the role of the digital currency, which is a sovereign currency,” said Wang Feng, chairman of the financial services firm Ye Lang Capital in Shanghai. “The third-party payment services, although widely used, are recognised as financial service providers and they will be subject to the central bank’s oversight.”