Russia’s war in Ukraine is obscuring one very alarming threat posed by the Chinese regime: its system of paperless money, warned hedge fund manager Kyle Bass.
“It is, I think, the single largest threat to the West in the last 50 years. And it’s being overshadowed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Bass said during a recent interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.
The Chinese digital currency, variously known as the digital yuan, digital renminbi, e-CYN, and e-yuan—is currently being developed by the Chinese regime through its central bank. Since the e-yuan is backed by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), it is a central bank digital currency (CBDC) or simply the digital version of China’s fiat currency.
So far, pilot tests of the e-yuan are being carried out in more than 20 different Chinese cities and the money was made available to visiting foreigners through a mobile app for the first time during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
“This isn’t a simple digital payment app. This is an app that tracks where you are, what your name is, what your social security number is, [and] what all of your identifiers are. It has the geo-locating ability,” he explained.
Bass explained once the Chinese digital money is fully-developed and is made available to everyone outside of China, the Chinese regime could seek out certain e-yuan users, such as those in financial trouble, and corrupt them.
“Image if the Chinese government had access to every Tom, Dick, and Harry in America, and in Europe, and in Canada,” he said. “Imagine if they could cross-run an algorithm that says, let’s look for U.S. government employees that have Tinder that are short on cash—and maybe they’re married—and we can corrupt them immediately.”
“It gives them the ramp to corrupt anyone and everyone around the world that’s corruptible, which is a real national security problem,” he added. “So it’s a way they can export digital authoritarianism.”
China’s global rollout of its e-yuan has a very specific agenda, Bass said, which is to reduce its dependence on the U.S. dollar.
By Frank Fang and Jan Jekielek
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