China is learning the lessons of Russia’s war in Ukraine and could use its centralized digital currency to avoid future sanctions, U.K. spy chief Jeremy Fleming will warn.
Fleming, the director of the intelligence, cyber and security agency GCHQ, will use a speech in London on Tuesday to argue the Chinese Communist Party leadership is using its "financial and scientific muscle” to manipulate strategically important technologies as a means to control companies and ordinary people. He will single out China’s currency as an example of that type of coercive behavior.
The digital currency "introduces efficiencies and new ways of settling payments, but the way it’s being implemented allows the monitoring of citizen and forces companies to use the service,” Fleming will say. "It might, in future, also enable China to partially evade the sorts of international sanctions currently being applied to Putin’s regime in Russia.”