Recently, I heard that China banned holding cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency transactions, so does that mean that having cryptocurrency in China would be a criminal offense? Moreover, why create such a ban in the first place?
1. China never banned holding crypto-currencies or transacting with them, they just don't support the use of it and often make crypto-services succumb to their rules, which makes it harder to use crypto-currencies for regular people.
2. Having crypto-currency is therefore not a criminal offense.
3. The reason they are imposing rules on exchanges (look at Alipay with Binance) is that they don't support the decentralized nature of crypto-currencies, and therefore want to restrict people from using it.