(This is a deep, long-form article—slightly lengthy. If you mind, please don’t read.)
Preface: reflections triggered by a single transfer
Suppose you now have twenty thousand dollars and you want to send it from New York to Shanghai.
Go through traditional banking channels: you need to fill out a chain of forms, pass through intermediary banks, go through currency conversions, wait one to three business days, and be charged a telegram fee and intermediary-bank fees that are hard to explain or even understand. The money “disappears” for dozens of hours on the way—you don’t know whose account it ends up in, and you don’t know how it was split into several parts that are then routed among multiple intermediary banks.
But if you’ve used any mainstream crypto-asset exchange, if you’ve used any mainstream public blockchain, you know what the other world is like: deposits, transfers, trading, withdrawals—done within minutes. The links are transparent, the fees are low, and it’s open 24/7, never closed. The feeling you get can be summed up in four words: you can’t go back.
This isn’t just sensitivity from a tech enthusiast. It’s a sense of the times. Just as people who have used smartphones can’t tolerate dialing up again, people who have used Web3 financial infrastructure can no longer show respect for Web2’s financial experience.
Behind it is a far deeper game than just "experience upgrades": China and the United States—two major powers—are opening up their positions on the financial battlefield, the most core, the most hidden, and the one that most determines national fortunes. This article will lay out the logic of this game along six threads, and in the end provide an answer that may be bold, but not groundless: RMB legislation, anchoring industrial electricity, and bringing it on-chain—directly confronting the dollar.
Chapter One: The hidden line—an underestimated financial disparity
The Sino-US competition is all-around: technology, the military, trade, industrial capacity, and rule-making power. But there is one front line discussed the least, yet it may decide the final outcome of all other fronts—finance.
First, a judgment that isn’t very pleasant but basically matches the facts: at the financial level, China’s gap with the United States is larger than the gap at the chip level, larger than the gap at the space level, and even larger than the gap at the number of aircraft carriers.
This is not about belittling ourselves or praising others. We will dismantle it step by step.
First layer: the international standing of money
The dollar accounts for nearly 60% of global foreign exchange reserves, exceeds 80% in global trade settlement, and appears as one side in foreign exchange transactions at a proportion close to 90%. After more than a decade of internationalization efforts, the RMB’s share in global payments has hovered around about 4%—and a substantial portion has been achieved under capital account control frameworks via specific channels. A currency that can’t be freely exchanged has a ceiling for internationalization. That ceiling can’t be broken by effort alone; it is determined by institutional design.
Second layer: the depth of financial markets and pricing power
The world’s most important risk-pricing center is in New York. US stocks, US Treasuries, the US dollar exchange rate, commodities (oil, gold, copper priced in USD)—the anchors for global risk assets all tie back to US financial markets. China’s A-share market and bond markets are sizable, but their influence over global capital pricing power is limited: foreign institutions’ holdings of Chinese bonds have hovered around roughly 3% for years, while 57% of global central bank reserves are USD assets. Pricing power means rule-interpretation power; rule-interpretation power means power over allocation of interests.
Third layer: the ecosystem of financial innovation
This is the most consequential layer—the one this article truly wants to talk about. America’s financial innovation is forced out by "circumstances"—note that "forced by circumstances" here has two layers of meaning.
The first layer is debt pressure. US federal debt has already surpassed $36 trillion, the debt-to-GDP ratio is over 120%, and interest expense has exceeded military spending. Under this fiscal structure, maintaining debt sustainability and maintaining Treasuries’ status as the world’s risk-free asset is no longer a choice—it is a lifeline. This forces the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and Wall Street to keep inventing new financial instruments, new liquidity channels, and new paths to monetize debt—ranging from QE to reverse repo tools, from standing repo facilities to the Bank Term Funding Program. Each crisis breeds a new batch of financial engineering.
The second implication is technological pressure. When the wealth-holding generation native to the internet grows up, and the traditional banking system is abandoned by younger generations in terms of efficiency and experience—if Wall Street doesn’t reinvent itself, Silicon Valley will do it for them. So the US chose a path of "regulatory domestication + big players entering the arena": Coinbase goes public, BlackRock issues a Bitcoin ETF, and traditional big banks rush to set up custody and tokenization businesses. America’s financial system is like an old but sturdy steam engine: cumbersome, yet it keeps adding new boilers to itself.
Looking back at China, the situation for financial innovation is far more complex.
China’s financial system is, in essence, a bank-led system with industrial policy orientation. Its core mission is credit allocation—to guide savings into the directions the state wants. This system is efficient and correct in the stage of industrialization catch-up. But it has a side effect: within the system, financial innovation is hard to obtain space for "innovation for the sake of innovation," because any ungoverned financial innovation means diluting the sovereignty of credit allocation.
Layer on top all the constraints that everyone tacitly understands—capital account controls, a harsh stance toward crypto assets, and heightened vigilance toward private financial activity. China’s main force in financial innovation, in practice, is confined to "efficiency optimization within the existing framework": mobile payments, the digital RMB, interbank market instruments, and green bonds. These are progress, but fundamentally they are Web2-era improvements, not a Web3 revolution.
A structural mismatch then emerges: the US grows a new system out of the old one; China does old innovation within the old system. In the short term, China’s approach is prudent. But when extended to a ten-year horizon, this may amount to an "intergenerational gap"—just as Kodak wasn’t without digital technology, but its organizational form didn’t allow it to become a digital camera company.
The gap itself isn’t what’s scary. What’s scary is misjudging the nature of the gap. If we understand financial gaps as "scale and efficiency gaps," then the countermeasure is to keep growing banks and keep optimizing payments. But if we understand the gap as a "paradigm gap," then the countermeasure is completely different. The arguments that follow in this article are precisely developed based on that judgment of "paradigm gap."
Chapter Two: The Trend—From the Information Internet to the Value Internet
The second thread is the underlying logic of the history of technology.
Over the past thirty years, the core problem that the internet has solved is the replication and dissemination of information. A letter becomes an email, a newspaper becomes a portal website, and an album becomes a streaming service. The marginal cost of information approaches zero. This is the greatest achievement of the internet—and also its most fundamental limitation: because information can be infinitely copied, information cannot carry "value."
The core attribute of value is scarcity and uniqueness. If you have a $100 bill, you can’t give the same bill to someone else at the same time; if the ownership of a house is registered under your name, it can’t be simultaneously registered under someone else’s name. The traditional internet can’t natively express this kind of "exclusive ownership," so it can only act as a courier of information, not a settlement house for value. Value settlement has long been done by centralized intermediaries—banks, clearinghouses, registries. The internet transmits instructions to them, and they record on their own ledgers.
Blockchain changes this.
In the 2008 white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, the engineering problem it solves is an old one: how to achieve consensus on the uniqueness of a ledger’s record among nodes that do not trust each other. Once this problem is solved, value can flow natively on the internet just like information: Bitcoin is value, tokens on Ethereum are value. An on-chain stablecoin, a liquidity position, or an NFT-encoded property title—these are all value.
This is what it means by "value internet": in the next thirty years of the internet, the object of transmission will upgrade from information to value.
Why is this judgment "undeniable"? Because it’s not the policy of a particular country or the strategy of a particular company—it is the inherent direction of technological evolution. Just as electricity inevitably replaces steam and inevitably replaces physical labor, you can regulate it and delay its implementation at home, but you can’t make global technological evolution stop to wait for you. When the telegraph appeared, the relay roads died; when the internet appeared, the telegraph died. When the cost of digitizing value is lower than paper instruments and lower than bank ledgers, the old system enters a countdown.
So what does this trend mean for China?
This means we face a strategic choice: the value internet is a new set of global financial infrastructure. And infrastructure competition has a ruthless feature: the first mover sets the standards, and the late mover pays the rent. TCP/IP wasn’t planned by any single government, but today the whole world has to use it. SWIFT wasn’t legislated by any one country’s parliament, but today cross-border settlement everywhere depends on it. Likewise, whichever chain, which stablecoin standard, which tokenization protocol becomes the "default layer" of the value internet—the underlying legal framework and the currency behind it will gain the next century of financial sovereignty.
Today, the number of holders of global crypto assets reaches into the hundreds of millions, and the on-chain weekly trading volume of stablecoins already exceeds many countries’ GDP. The scale of tokenized Treasuries is rapidly expanding. The value internet isn’t a "will it come" question—it’s a "who will define it" question.
Chapter Three: The On-Chain Evolution of the Dollar—Hegemony isn’t grown by defending; it is grown
Many people’s understanding of dollar hegemony is still stuck in the old narrative of "petrodollars": Saudi Arabia sells oil only for dollars, so the whole world needs the dollar. This narrative has become seriously outdated in the 2020s.
A new script looks like this: dollar hegemony is proactively completing a "blockchainization" evolution, riding on the Internet’s free ride and seeping into every corner of the world.
First, see the basic reality: today, the unit of account and settlement medium for global on-chain finance is overwhelmingly USD stablecoins. The combined market cap of USDT and USDC has already exceeded 200 billion US dollars, and daily trading volumes often reach the order of tens of billions—more than Visa and Mastercard combined. Even more important is the use case: in Argentina, Turkey, Nigeria, Venezuela—economies where local-currency inflation is out of control—USD stablecoins are not trading tools for speculation; they are ordinary people’s savings for wealth preservation and settlement tools for cross-border business. In Southeast Asia and Latin America’s cross-border e-commerce, stablecoins are replacing Western Union remittances. In mobile-payment scenarios in Black Africa, the penetration rate of USDT exceeds that of all bank apps.
So what does this mean? It means the dollar has accomplished a feat that it has never managed in the past eighty years: bypassing the banking system and directly reaching the smartphone wallets of billions of people worldwide.
The globalization of the traditional dollar requires the Federal Reserve, correspondent banks, SWIFT, and coordination by central banks around the world—layered, embedded, and costly. It can also be weaponized for geopolitics (sanctions mean cutting off this channel). On-chain dollars only need a wallet address. Like water, it seeps through the gaps in sovereign regulation and takes root anywhere there are smartphones and mobile networks. You ban exchanges, and people use over-the-counter trading. You block websites, and people use decentralized front ends. For the first time, dollar hegemony gains a distributed form that is "resistant to blockades."
Add another layer: tokenizing US Treasuries. Giants like BlackRock are turning US Treasuries into tokens, allowing global capital to hold and trade "digital Treasuries" on-chain 7×24. This effectively casts the United States’ national credit directly into the underlying asset layer of a global value internet—previously it was "dollar-backing oil"; now it’s "dollar-backing computing power and code." The other end of tokenized Treasuries is the on-chain yield-bearingization of the dollar: holding stablecoins becomes more than just holding cash—it becomes holding interest-bearing quasi-money-market-fund assets. This will create a terrifying flywheel: the more on-chain economic activity there is, the higher the demand for stablecoins; the deeper the tokenization of Treasuries, the stronger the dollar’s network effects.
Looking back, this is an extremely shrewd move on the chessboard. America’s domestic debt is unsustainable, and the ability to absorb global savings through traditional channels is diminishing at the margin. So it changed the battlefield: selling its Treasuries directly to global on-chain users, replacing investment banks with code and clearing institutions with blockchain, turning the pressure of $36 trillion in debt into "underlying protocol revenue" for the global value internet.
This is the deeper meaning of "forced by circumstances, having to keep innovating in finance": the two heavy stones—debt pressure and technology pressure—press out a proactive mutation of dollar hegemony, evolving from hegemony of the banking system into hegemony at the protocol layer.
In the past, whoever controlled the banks controlled the dollar; in the future, whoever controls the on-chain dollar issuance and settlement standards controls the dollar. And as of now, this evolution nearly has no seat for the RMB. The digital RMB (e-CNY) pilot has been running for years and is technically solid, but it is a sovereign closed system: it hasn’t been opened to global developers, hasn’t been integrated into global on-chain liquidity, and hasn’t become a settlement asset on any public chain. Two species: one grows brutally and permeates the world on a permissionless open network; the other is cautiously piloted within a permissioned closed loop. When you look back ten years from now, this may not be a gap but a tier difference.
Chapter Four: The Crushing Experience—Why "You can’t go back" isn’t a joke
If you talk too much about theory, people get carried away. Let’s come back to each ordinary user’s lived experience. Because in the competition of financial infrastructure, ultimately it’s the billions of users voting with their feet.
People who have traded coins have this experience: when you finish in an exchange the whole sequence from depositing to trading to withdrawing, and then open a platform like Huobi? (or a fund/stock app) or a bank app, you get a strong sense of temporal mismatch—
In speed, on-chain confirmation is on the scale of minutes or even seconds, while bank transfers are "business hours and working days." Cross-ledger transfers take minutes, and cross-border remittances take days. In an age of instant satisfaction, making young people wait "1–3 business days" is like sending people who have used 4G back to dial-up.
At the boundary, the crypto market is open 7×24×365—never closed. Traditional markets are "already closed." On weekends when major events happen, people who trade coins have already finished three rounds of decisions, while retail investors are still waiting for Monday’s opening.
From the asset perspective, in a world on-chain, money, stocks (tokenization), bonds, derivatives, liquidity instruments, and NFTs can all be freely combined in the same wallet and on the same interface. In the traditional world, your stocks sit with brokerage firms, your deposits sit with banks, and your wealth management sits with asset management companies—every wall requires identity verification and transfer waiting.
In terms of tool innovation, the AMM mechanism of DEXs allows anyone to provide liquidity for any asset and earn fees—this in traditional finance is called "becoming a market maker," which is an institution-only privilege. Lending protocols let any asset be used as collateral to borrow any other asset. Perpetual contracts give global retail users, for the first time, leverage tools almost equivalent to those used by professional institutions. Flash loans, structured products, yield aggregators... these are already "basic Lego bricks" on-chain—unheard of in Web2 finance.
Someone may say: what about risks? Scams? Admittedly, in the on-chain world, sand and gravel run together—rug pulls, hackers, and impermanent loss are real. But note a historical law: the early stage of every new paradigm is never safe; safety has never been the characteristic of the new. In the early days of the internet, piracy and scams were breeding grounds, and today it carries a substantial portion of global GDP. Experience crushing is real, efficiency crushing is real, and risks can be managed as infrastructure matures and regulatory technology keeps up—just as Wall Street became "safe" only after repeated crises and regulation (1929, 1987, 2008).
The key issue is this: when billions of young people around the world get used to this kind of financial experience, and when they become the main force of the world economy, will they accept "coming back"? The answer is no. Just like no one today wants to give up mobile payments and return to the cash era—even if you tell them cash is more private and safer.
This is where paradigm shifts are most ruthless: it doesn’t argue with you about the merits. It only turns you into an old relic.
Then what about China’s financial users? Chinese investors are protected behind Web2’s high walls. Many have never experienced the on-chain world, so they don’t feel like they’re "missing something." This is a form of protection—and also a form of isolation. Isolation means that when the default experience of global finance gets redefined by Web3, Chinese users’ financial experience will systematically lag behind the world, and the product capabilities of China’s financial institutions will also systematically lag behind global peers. The cost of protection may be generational.
Chapter Five: Energy’s Diversion—Replacing the Lifeblood of Industry
We have laid the foundation across four chapters on finance and technology. Now let’s raise the dimension further and talk about energy—because the ultimate answer to the money question doesn’t lie in finance; it lies in the physical world.
Every leap in human civilization is, at the foundation, a leap in the form of energy.
The steam engine turns coal into power, and humanity enters the industrial age. The internal combustion engine turns oil into mobility, and humanity enters the oil-and-gas era. Oil is therefore not only a commodity, but also the "lifeblood of industry"—whoever controls the supply and settlement of oil controls the throat of industrial civilization. The essence of petrodollar is a fusion of energy hegemony and monetary hegemony: the US controls supply (Middle East order), controls the channels (the Navy), and controls settlement (the dollar)—a triad in one.
But today, the energy map is undergoing a replacement unseen in a century.
The replacement of gas vehicles by electric vehicles is no longer a prediction—it’s already a fact. Over the past fifteen years, the per-kWh cost of photovoltaic and wind power has fallen by 80–90%, already below coal power. Energy storage technology makes it possible to "transport time" for electricity. Heat pumps, electric furnaces, electric heavy trucks, electric ships, and even e-fuels (e-fuel) and green hydrogen are all shifting end-use energy consumption from "burning molecules" to "consuming electrons." Humanity is moving, as a whole, from the oil-and-gas era into the electrical era.
Electricity becomes the new lifeblood of industry. To make this statement concrete, it has several layers of meaning:
First, the nature of electricity as a productive asset has changed
Oil depends on geological endowments and is distributed highly unevenly (Middle East, Russia, the US), which naturally benefits resource countries in the oil era. Electricity sources—sunlight and wind—are distributed more evenly, so the real endowment becomes manufacturing capacity: whoever can make cheap solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, transformers, and ultra-high-voltage equipment becomes the "resource country" of the new era. This happens to be the strongest area of "Made in China": China holds roughly 80–90% of global photovoltaic production capacity, 60–70% of capacity for power batteries, and 80–90% of rare-earth processing. Energy transition is a national-fortune-level tailwind for China—no matter how much you emphasize it, it won’t be excessive.
Second, electricity needs a new pricing anchor
In the oil era, oil’s pricing naturally fits with being dollar-linked because oil must be transported across borders, must be shipped by sea, and must be insured and financed—every step of the chain sits inside the US dollar system. But electricity is the most difficult commodity to store and transport. Electricity trade naturally relies on regional power grids. In the green-power era, a new variable appears: computing power. AI data centers are a new global source of the highest demand for electricity, and computing power is a borderless commodity—electricity is generated somewhere, while computing power can serve the globe. Computing-power trade may replace a portion of oil trade, becoming a new main backbone for global value flows.
Third, the physical foundation of the monetary anchor is migrating
In the gold standard era, money’s anchor was gold. In the petrodollar era, money’s anchor was oil (backed by the US military and Gulf order). In the electrical era, money’s physical anchor, logically, should point to electricity—along with the whole set of industrial capabilities behind electricity: power grids, manufacturing, computing power, and energy storage.
This sets up the foreshadowing for the answer in the next chapter: if the ultimate credit of money comes from "what you can buy," then over the next fifty years, the list of things that global hard currency can buy will no longer have oil as the first item—it will be electricity and everything driven by electricity.
Chapter Six: China’s Breakthrough—Lu Qiyuan’s thesis, the electricity anchor, and RMB legislation
After discussing the "trend" across five chapters, we finally reach the toughest one: "what should we do?"
First, make the premise clear: this article doesn’t fantasize about the RMB challenging the dollar’s existing stock position in the short term—that would disrespect the facts. This article discusses the incremental battleground of the next decade—value internet and the electrical era. In these two new battlegrounds, the situation is still undecided. China, in fact, holds a good hand, but this hand has not yet been played correctly.
This good hand has three cards: the world’s strongest power industrial system (the highest global power generation output—more than the sum of the US, Japan, and Europe; ultra-high-voltage transmission, smart grids, and a complete chain of photovoltaic and storage), the world’s strongest manufacturing industry (the most complete range of industrial categories—an ultimate machine for turning electricity into commodities), and the leading technological reserves for the digital RMB. None of the three cards alone is scarce; together, they form the only combination in the world.
The problem is: without an institutional mechanism to convert these three cards into monetary credit, nothing will work. And that institutional mechanism is the very thing Professor Lu Qiyuan has emphasized repeatedly over the years—RMB legislation.
The core of Professor Lu Qiyuan’s thesis, translated into this article’s language, is: sovereign money can’t rely only on administrative credit endorsement. It needs a legally defined, understandable, and verifiable value anchor. The dollar’s anchor today is Treasury credit and military order—this anchor is leaking. If the RMB dares to anchor to an appreciating, physical, strategic asset—industrial electricity—it makes a daring leap from "unanchored money" to "anchored money."
In concrete terms, let’s boldly expand on this idea:
Step one: RMB legislation—complete the currency’s constitutional moment
By clarifying through legislation the RMB’s value foundation, and on the central bank’s balance sheet constructing an anchor mechanism for "industrial electricity rights"—this can be designed as: a certain proportion of RMB issuance (for example, part of incremental issuance) corresponds to a portfolio of power assets held by the nation: long-term contracts for green electricity, grid assets, strategic energy storage, and (key) national-level computing infrastructure. This is similar to the exchange-standard model, but the anchor is not gold and not the dollar—it is "the source of power for China’s industrial system."
Why legislate instead of issuing an administrative document? Because only legislation can produce credible commitments. The essence of a currency’s credibility is the trustworthiness of commitments. Saying "the RMB is linked to industrial electricity" makes the whole world believe that this statement will stay unchanged for fifty years; that can only be achieved through legislation, through institutions, and through the auditability of the central bank’s balance sheet assets. Once a credible commitment is established, "the stability of RMB purchasing power is linked to the stability of China’s industrial electricity costs" will become a global consensus among traders, resource countries, and manufacturing countries—just like the old consensus of "oil linked to the dollar."
Step two: bring it on-chain—enter the protocol layer of the value internet
Anchor to solve the question of "how much is the value?" and settle on-chain the question of "how does it flow?" While establishing the power anchor in legislation, issue RMB stablecoins (or what you might call an open digital RMB version) that comply with the regulatory framework, so that they become freely settleable assets on global public blockchains.
The key to this step is "two-way openness": it allows global users, under compliance prerequisites, to hold and transfer RMB stablecoins, and it also allows on-chain assets to be tokenized within China’s regulatory framework. This injects RMB liquidity into the global value internet, not into a closed loop. Imagine a scenario: Indonesia’s nickel mine operators, Saudi Arabia’s green hydrogen developers, and Central Asia’s photovoltaic power station investors can accept RMB stablecoins for settlement because they can keep a ledger—behind the RMB is anchored the world’s cheapest, most stable, most scalable industrial electricity. Holding RMB equals holding proof of access to the动力 pool of China’s industrial system. In the green-power era, this is the logic of a new "petrodollar."
Step three: treat computing power as the converter between electricity and money
Electricity is difficult to transport, but computing power isn’t. China can fully build a positive feedback loop of "electricity—computing power—RMB": western green electricity → data centers → AI computing power and global computing services → settlement via RMB stablecoins → recycled RMB reinvested into power infrastructure. In this way, the electricity anchor isn’t just an accounting concept—it becomes an active system with a real cash-flow loop. Global AI companies’ hunger for computing power will become hunger for the RMB—just like global factories’ hunger for oil became hunger for the dollar in the past.
Step four: the urgency of time
Why must it be "as soon as possible"? Because the window is closing. The flywheel of the dollar blockchainization has already started: stablecoin penetration, the scale of tokenized Treasuries, and the on-chain developer ecosystem are all self-reinforcing every day. In the protocol layer of the value internet, things become basically set within three years. By the time the default position of on-chain dollars becomes as deeply rooted as today’s SWIFT, switching later would cost exponentially. China’s power ace is also only scarce in this five- to ten-year transition window—its advantages in photovoltaic and energy storage manufacturing will be caught up, and the electricity-demand dividend will be claimed by other countries.
Of course, it’s necessary to be honest about risks and difficulties:
First, capital account opening is an obstacle you can’t bypass. Putting money on-chain naturally implies cross-border free flow of value, which creates fundamental tension with the current management framework. This is a real problem, but the answer shouldn’t be "so therefore we won’t do it." The answer should be "design openness with management"—gradually release liquidity under risk-controlled conditions using quotas, whitelists, and tiered account systems. Between a completely closed system and a completely open one, there is huge space for institutional design.
Second, the stability of the electricity anchor. Electricity prices are affected by seasons, regions, and policies. How to build a smoothed anchoring index, and how to prevent manipulation of the anchor itself—this requires extremely delicate financial engineering. But note that gold under a gold standard also has price volatility, and oil prices under the petrodollar regime are even more volatile. The anchor’s function isn’t absolute stability—it’s being verifiable and predictable.
Third, global acceptability. Without support from military hegemony and existing network effects, the globalization of an RMB electricity anchor can only rely on economic interests to attract. And that is precisely where our advantage lies: China lacks neither trade partners nor the ability to build a “circle of friends” using commercial interests. The tangible-network of the Belt and Road Initiative, layered with the monetary network of RMB stablecoins, is a realistic and feasible path.
Conclusion: The end of money is physical
Let’s write to the end and look back at the logic chain of the whole article:
In the financial layer of the Sino-US competition, China has a gap on the order of being multiple tiers behind. Meanwhile, America’s financial innovation is a kind of evolution forced by dual pressure from debt and technology. The direction of this evolution chain is already very clear: the dollar is becoming blockchain-based, riding the Internet’s “free ride” to seep into every corner of the globe, shifting from hegemony of banks to hegemony of protocols.
And the technological tide is unstoppable: the information internet must inevitably steer toward the value internet—just as the telegraph had to give way to the telephone. On this new channel, crushing changes in experience and efficiency have already taken place, user migration has already happened, and the hardening of standards is already underway.
Meanwhile, the physical world is also changing tracks: the oil-and-gas era is heading toward the electrical era; electricity becomes the new lifeblood of industry; the physical anchor of money is migrating from black oil to green electricity and silvery silicon chips.
When these three threads converge, they point to the same strategic answer: China should complete RMB legislation, anchor the RMB’s value foundation to industrial electricity, and rely on the credible commitments established by legislation to get the RMB on-chain as soon as possible—before the protocol layer of the value internet hardens—so that the RMB can directly confront dollar monetary sovereignty.
This plan is bold—one could even say aggressive. But history has never defined money as a game for cautious players. The dollar replaced the pound not because London agreed, but because two world wars shattered the old anchor—and the US held onto gold and oil. Today, the old anchor is loosening under erosion from new technology: $36 trillion in debt, a lagging banking experience, and an industrial system facing energy replacement. Among the candidates for a new anchor, China holds the toughest card: industrial electricity in an electrical era—an entire-industries-chain manufacturing kingdom.
Professor Lu Qiyuan said that currency legislation is the “coming-of-age ceremony” of the RMB’s journey to the world. This article wants to add that the time and place of this coming-of-age ceremony have already been selected by history: time is before value internet protocols harden, and place is at the intersection of electricity and code.
You missed the steam engine, missed the electrical age, missed the information internet—but fortunately, this time the starter’s pistol has just gone off.
(This article discusses macro trends and institutional concepts and does not constitute any investment advice. The ideas mentioned belong to theoretical exploration; actual policy formulation must go through thorough argumentation and risk assessment.)