China: Beijing wants a national blockchain network, still without Bitcoin

A line in a flowing text. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the government issued a 19-measure opinion on "new quality productive forces" on October 9. One of them calls for building a national blockchain network. Part of the crypto press already sees this as a change of heart from Beijing. However, the document contains neither timetable, nor budget, nor the slightest word on Bitcoin. It extends a project opened at the beginning of 2025 with national data infrastructures.

What the Beijing text really says about national blockchain

Open the document, titled “Opinion on the Development of New Quality Productive Forces” and released by the Xinhua agency on October 9, 2026. It has seven chapters. Blockchain only appears in measure 9, devoted to “the deep integration of the real economy and the digital economy”. Beijing asks to “build an integrated national computing power network and a national blockchain network”. The text does not say more about this network.

The rest of the measure talks about artificial intelligence, the industrial internet and data ownership. No amount is advanced. No deadline either, and the document does not designate an operator or technical architecture. Measure 17 adds an “efficient, practical and secure” mechanism for the cross-border flow of data, a subject that is of more interest to multinationals based in China than to bitcoin holders.

State blockchain and banned cryptos, the Chinese line has not moved

The Coingape site evokes a possible “regulatory reversal” from Beijing on cryptos. Nothing in the notice supports this. Chinese policy has for years favored permissioned registers, blockchains whose validators are chosen and identified, when anyone can run a Bitcoin node. This line is from October 24, 2019. That day, Xi Jinping presented the technology to the Politburo as an “important breakthrough” for the country’s innovation. Two years later, in September 2021, the central bank declared all cryptocurrency transactions illegal.

The October 9 notice affects none of this. The words “virtual currency” and “digital yuan” do not appear there. Mining remains prohibited, and China still accounted for 11.7% of the global Bitcoin hashrate in January 2026 (the hashrate is the total computing power that secures the network).

Why this Chinese blockchain network still matters

But brushing aside the announcement would be a mistake. The rank of the text is heavy. An opinion co-signed by the Central Committee and the State Council is among the country's highest policy documents, those that set the course for ministries and provinces. Until now, blockchain appeared mainly in technical texts. The guidelines of December 31, 2024 included it among the data circulation infrastructures. In April 2026, the tax authorities and the financial regulator recommended it for sharing the tax files of SMEs with banks. The National Data Administration estimates investment in this infrastructure at around 400 billion yuan per year, or nearly $58 billion.