China's Cashless Revolution: From Cash to Code

By Harry Wu, 21st Century Business Herald, SFC

Martin Chorzempa, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Author of The Cashless Revolution: China's Reinvention of Money, shared his personal experience with 21st Century Business Herald at the 2025 Bund Summit.

"I lived in China from 2013 to 2015. When I moved here, I bought almost everything in cash," he lamented. His subsequent visits to China have witnessed incredibly rapid progress in digital finance. China's adoption of cashless finance is much faster than in other countries, effectively enabling the development of an entire digital ecosystem.

This experience inspired Chorzempa to conduct research on financial liberalization in China. In 2022, he published his book The Cashless Revolution: China's Reinvention of Money.

Chorzempa has discovered that people with no previous borrowing history can now borrow and lend based on the data generated by digital finance. He has watched this unfold step by step, and China is experiencing a unique period of transformation, which creates incredible opportunities for financial inclusion.

Looking ahead, he said that it will be very interesting to observe how central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and stablecoins develop. CBDCs may lay a good foundation for new cross-border payments, while stablecoins might not be sufficiently stable. Despite their current growth, stablecoins are still relatively small and may not be truly secure, Chorzemp added.