China’s digital yuan enters school with launch of smart student ID card

Students in China will soon use digital yuan to make payments for student loans and tuition after a high school in China’s southernmost Hainan Province trialled digital student ID card that allow students to make payments using digital yuan at designated stores on the campus.

The new digital yuan student ID card, which is a plam-sized device that look like a small mobile phone, is trailed by Hainan Luxun High school in the city of Sanya of China’s southernmost Hainan Province.

The student ID card features a digital yuan wallet, a GPS tracking system and an emergency call service, allowing parents to transfer digital yuan, track their children’s location and access their consumption records using a special SIM card.

In addition, parents can add up to 20 other numbers for incoming calls to the device to help children “avoid the harassment of unknown calls”.

The digital card was co-developed by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and telecoms companies,

Digital Yuan, also known as e-CNY, is intended to be alternative to the paper currency. Like the paper currency, China’s central bank- People’s Bank of China will govern and control the supply and distribution of digital currency. It will then issue and distribute the digital currency via different commercial banks.

China became the first major economy to begin exploring its own central bank digital currency (CBDC) in 2014, the country has taken the headline by rolling out trial issuance of a digital yuan in cities since 2019.

The trail for digital yuan has already started in some of the country’s most developed regions including Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Suzhou and Greater Bay Area encompassing Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macau.

In December 2020, JD.com has partnered with the Digital Currency Research Institute of the People’s Bank of China to test the applications of the Chinese digital currency, making it the first e-commerce platform to accept China’s digital yuan for online shopping.

According to state-run People’s Daily, the e-CNY had 261 million users by the end of 2021. As of mid-February, 116,800 stores across Hainan accepted the digital currency.