SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Chinas central bank on Monday warned that rejecting cash as a form of payment was illegal, saying that such practices could eventually could cause the loss of confidence in physical money and was unfair to those not accustomed to electronic payments.
Its comments, made in a post on its official WeChat account, come as electronic payments via Alibaba Groups Alipay or Tencent Holdingss WeChat have become increasingly popular in China where they are accepted on platforms such as public transport and at retailers like coffee shops.
The ease of use has meant that some vendors, especially in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, have stopped accepting physical cash.
Electronic payments has given us a new way to pay, but it must not replace cash payments, the Peoples Bank of China said. Over time, the practice can become second nature and people could lose confidence in cash.
It added that it was particularly unfair to the elderly and people who lived in underdeveloped parts of the country who would have difficulty in mastering the processes needed for electronic payment.The central bank also pointed out that some local authorities were promoting their technology advancements with taglines like cashless city, but said that this should not mean that they no longer accepted money.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-payment/china-says-rejecting-physical-cash-is-illegal-amid-e-payments-popularity-idUSKBN1O902F....
China appears to be adopting the inverse polar opposite of a cashless society.
This makes for an interesting contrast with other nations many of whom view a transition to cashless payment systems as being a natural progression.
If someone wanted to cite reasons behind china adopting the opposite of a cashless society, while many other nations of the world embraced the opposite abstract--how would they explain this? What would the main motive behind differences in policy be?
I wouldn't say that they are adopting a non-cashless society per se.
As far as anyone is concerned, cashless payments in China is extremely widespread and is only growing. It doesn't make sense to say that they are moving away from cashlessness while this kind of large scale digital economic activity is still happening.
All this is is probably just an indicator of exactly how much cashlessness has grown in China, to the point where the central bank needs to intervene in order to get people to accept cash. It doesn't mean that the cashless society aspect of China will necessarily diminish in the future, or that the central bank wants to revert back to cash at all. It's just trying to enforce the legality of paper based fiat, imho.