China's Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council issued directives on Friday, October 9, 2026, ordering the construction of a sovereign, closed national blockchain network that is explicitly designed to avoid public decentralized platforms such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The order forms part of a 19-point comprehensive plan for industrial modernization. According to an official communiqué published by Xinhua news agency, the goal is unambiguous: "We must accelerate the construction of an integrated national computing power network and a national blockchain network to promote the deep integration of the real economy and the digital economy."
The new infrastructure is intended to audit data, optimize industrial supply chains and coordinate national computing capacity. Unlike the digital yuan, which remains strictly monetary and oriented toward the banking system and commercial financial settlements, the new ledger is conceived as a system to catalog business data as a strategic factor of production, placed alongside capital, land and labor.
Practical applications outlined in the directives include industrial smart contracts to automate the delivery of state subsidies, verification of carbon metrics, and the management of manufacturing logistics between companies and regulators. The network is also set to function as the accounting backbone of the "Data from the East, Computing from the West" project, which coordinates data flows toward processing centers built in inland China.
A deliberate break from public networks
The directives reiterate China's existing ban on cryptocurrency trading and digital mining within its territory, and they explicitly prohibit hasty investments or speculation that could risk the stability of real markets. The choice to build a closed, state-controlled ledger rather than engage with public blockchain infrastructure marks a clear divergence from the approach taken in several other jurisdictions.
Singapore, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates have moved toward fostering integration with public networks and asset tokenization. The United States and the European Union, meanwhile, have prioritized building regulatory frameworks around traditional markets and public smart contract networks rather than developing sovereign alternatives.
For European policymakers, the Chinese approach offers a contrasting model at a moment when the bloc continues to calibrate its own rules for crypto-assets and distributed ledger technology under frameworks such as MiCA. Where Brussels and Washington have largely worked to accommodate public blockchain infrastructure within existing financial supervision, Beijing's directives point toward a parallel, state-run system kept deliberately separate from both the digital yuan and from Bitcoin and Ethereum, with data treated as a resource to be governed directly by the state rather than exchanged on open networks.
