The Chinese Digital Currency: : A Confrontation with the Dollar's Structural Power?

• Autor(a) principal: Boaventura, Alba
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Nogueira, Isabela, de Conti, Bruno
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Conjuntura Austral
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/ConjunturaAustral/article/view/127669
• topic: Chinese Digital Currency; Digital Silk Road; Dollar’s Structural Power.; Moeda Digital Chinesa; Rota da Seda Digital; Poder Estrutural do Dólar.

China's pioneerism on creating a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) leaves numerous questions regarding its implications to the global power dynamics. In this context, the goal of this paper is to analyze in what ways the digital renminbi (e-CNY) may represent a threat to the dollar’s structural power in the international system and to discuss its main limits. We resort to the conceptual framework of the dollar’s structural power for the American hegemony and highlight the political repercussions arising from this centrality. Next, we scrutinize the Chinese digitalization both from a monetary and operational perspective and from a Digital Silk Road initiative one, considering that the latter includes multiple instruments (of infrastructure, technology, digital commerce and cyberspace governance) that support the e-CNY’s dissemination. This paper argues that the e-CNY’s launch may give in the long run a new impetus towards internationalizing the renminbi to ascend in the international monetary hierarchy via its promotion on regional payments, especially on the e-commerce sector. However, this does not affect the structural position of the dollar in the short run because the limits to an expressive expansion of the e-CNY in the International Monetary System remain quite significant.