Richard Turrin, Cashless: China's Digital Currency Revolution.
Richard Turrin, Cashless: China's Digital Currency Revolution. (Authority Publishing, 2021)
Richard Turrin is a person in business and finance who arrived in Shanghai in 2010 where he personally witnessed China's long evolution into a "cashless" society. Having taught students aspiring for an MBA degree in New York, he went to Shanghai to work for IBM, and from there to Singapore where he witnessed its transition from banking to digital. When he returned to Shanghai in 2018, he was virtually blown away by the fact that OR codes were appearing everywhere, and a central bank currency (CBDC, aka DC/EP, and digital RMB or eRMB are acronyms new to readers in the West), no Chinese were using money, and that in its place everything was entirely digital. (That year, out of habit, he was carrying in his pocket 300 RMB which was never used.)
Turrin's first book was Innovation Lab: Digital Transformation from Within. (2019). Cashless: China's Digital Currency Revolution (Authority Publishing, 2021) was his second where he shows that the digital transformation didn't just happen overnight, but went through a long process of trial and error.
Despite China's careful planning and its regular press releases regarding its long history of development, the announcement still sent shockwaves worldwide, especially in the United States. What is clear is that this financial technology ("fintech") will be making waves in international circles, not confined to China alone. Fintech is also moving to Southeast countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. Now with Covid-19 infecting the world, digital currencies are seen in new light as the fear of infection diminishes people's love affair with coins and cash, though cash is still used and accepted, but for practical purposes, most people don't even touch paper money and don't bother carrying any.
Though the US and the West see Asian countries, such as Japan in the 1970s as "copying" technology from the West, the latter had improved the copied technology considerably, so that its car manufacturers such as Toyota and Honda have been sought after by consumers worldwide. Likewise, we can say that China had also copied technology from the West, but its creative innovation in recent years has gone way beyond that of the West. Today China is at least five to ten years ahead of the West in digital currency. The US and Europe, with the exception of forward looking countries like Sweden, have fallen behind in digital banking.
Though the West, especially the banks in the US are resisting fintech. the wave of the future is that the latter will soon adopt digital currency one way or another, ending with the Chinese RMB (yuan) as central, possibly replacing the US dollar which is so disconcerting in the West, especially the US, which realizes it has to "catch up" with China in its innovation of digital currency through Alibaba, Alipay, and Wechat. What China has done in fintech is to make banking and other institutions available to many of its rural citizens, institutions which were previously unavailable to them. Digital Currency Revolution in China, according to Turrin, is a form of "social justice."
On his last trip to Italy, Turrin felt something strange or unusual. In his front pocket was a large pile of change that had accumulated from all the cash transactions that he had made. Being used to a cashless society in China, Turrin felt unnatural. The feeling of change in his pocket for him was "quaint but unwelcome."
— Franklin J. Woo
(The 2020 and 2021 torrential rains flooding provinces in China have rendered the cell phones of residents useless, so they could not purchase food and other items of daily necessity, especially when they do not carry cash at hand.)