China's central bank has issued 10 million yuan ($1.5m; £1.1m) worth of digital currency to 50,000 people in the Shenzhen area via a lottery.
The move is the latest in a series of trials testing out China's new Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP).
Those who were successful received digital
"red packets" worth about 200 yuan, which they could download and spend at more than 3,000 stores.
Nearly two million people signed up to take part in the lottery.
The People's Bank of China (PBOC) says it plans to launch DCEP later this year, although it is yet to set a date.
In April, it was conducting tests in four cities across China, and intends to pilot the system at future Winter Olympics venues.
The DCEP is not a crypto-currency. Instead it is a digital version of China's official currency the yuan, which is issued and backed by the central bank.
It is part of China's push for a cashless society, a process which is already well advanced.
Who are the BBC? The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters are at Broadcasting House in Westminster, London and it is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees. It employs over
What is Cashless? A cashless society describes an economic state whereby financial transactions are not conducted with money in the form of physical banknotes or coins. Transactions are through the transfer of digital information (usually an electronic representation of money) between the transacting parties
Cashless societies have existed from the time when human society came into existence, based on barter and other methods of exchange, and cashless transactions have also become possible in modern times using digital currencies such as bitcoin.
What is China? China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC) is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population of around 1.4 billion in 2019. Covering approximately 9.6 million square kilometres, it is the world's third or fourth-largest country by area. Governed solely
by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the state exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four direct-controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing), and the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau. China is a unitary one-party socialist republic, and is one of the few existing nominally socialist states. Political dissidents and human rights groups have denounced and criticized the Chinese government for human rights abuses, including suppression of religious and ethnic minorities, censorship, mass surveillance, and their response to protests, notably in 1989.
What is DigitalCurrency? Digital currency (digital money, electronic money or electronic currency) is a type of currency available in digital form. This is in contrast to physical, such as banknotes and coins. It exhibits properties similar to physical currencies, but can allow for instantaneous transactions and borderless
transfer-of-ownership. Examples include virtual currencies, cryptocurrencies, and central bank digital currency (CBDC). Digital money can either be centralized, where there is a central point of control over the money supply, or decentralized, where the control over the money supply can come from various sources.
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