From May 17 to 18, the 2025 Tsinghua Wudaokou Global Financial Forum was held in Shenzhen. In the sub-forum themed "2025 China Economic Outlook", Wang Yongli, former Vice President of Bank of China and Co-Chairman of Founder Group, stated that facing increasingly complex international situations, China needs to solidly do its own work and accelerate the development of domestic and international dual circulation. Among these, accelerating cross-border RMB payment and clearing is an important infrastructure and driving force.
Currently, China has achieved many accomplishments in cross-border RMB payment and clearing development, including promoting inter-bank payment and clearing, establishing its own bank card organization, establishing and developing the RMB Cross-border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), and increasing cooperation with Swift.
Meanwhile, new formats have emerged in cross-border payment and clearing, with the development of crypto assets giving rise to legal stablecoins. Today, the legal currency payment and clearing system cannot meet the demand for 24-hour online global transactions, and without convertibility to legal tender, crypto assets' value becomes difficult to realize, severely constraining their development. Therefore, in Wang Yongli's view, if crypto assets are legalized, corresponding monetary payment and clearing support would be needed.
Wang Yongli noted that in the United States, stablecoins pegged to legal currency have emerged between legal currency and crypto assets, with USDT and USDC being the most typical examples. Currently, stablecoins are primarily dollar-based, and their potential impacts deserve high attention from other countries. Particularly, stablecoins need to use new technologies to promote monetary operation efficiency, reduce costs, and ensure strict risk control.
After stablecoins' emergence, traditional crypto assets like Bitcoin are rapidly developing, and new fields of digital asset securitization such as Non-Fungible Tokens and RWA are emerging. Therefore, when promoting cross-border payment and clearing, currency cannot remain in traditional service modes and domains, but needs to utilize new technologies and even learn from stablecoins' models and technologies to transform monetary operation methods.
Wang Yongli suggested that mainland China's industry and academic fields should give higher attention to stablecoin development and promote digital RMB's further development. "If a stablecoin is pegged to a certain legal currency, theoretically, the stablecoin is a token of the pegged currency. If tokens can achieve this level, why can't our legal currency?"
Wang Yongli also warned that existing US dollar stablecoins are diverse, but too many dollar stablecoins are not necessarily beneficial. A more unified operating mechanism needs to be established.
When further discussing financial technology development, Wang Yongli pointed out that China is currently leading globally in mobile payment and digital currency domains. However, repeated construction, data islands, and security risks are becoming "hidden reefs" constraining high-quality development. Specifically, various institutions' self-built payment and data systems cause interface chaos, increasing interconnection costs and causing smaller institutions to gradually fall behind. All data assets are essentially controlled by transaction handlers (such as platform enterprises) rather than true transaction initiators (users or enterprises), potentially causing privacy leakage and misuse risks. Unclear data asset ownership and unclear circulation rules constrain digital asset value release.
In response, Wang Yongli proposed constructing centralized digital infrastructure using digital RMB as a template. Digital RMB's unified central bank App architecture can theoretically collect comprehensive transaction data and enable precise tracing at natural person/legal person dimensions. If this model is extended to identity information management, users might replace physical certificates with digital IDs, independently setting information usage scenarios and validity periods.
"If actual breakthroughs can be made in these aspects, then digital currency, digital assets, digital finance, and digital society will undergo fundamental changes," Wang Yongli said.
