| A subway passenger uses a QR code to pay ticket fares on a Shanghai-developed app at a subway station in Beijing, China’s capital, December 2, 2020. (Xinhua/Zhang Chenlin) |
China is on its way to becoming the world’s leading cashless society, said Kent Matthews, a banking and finance professor at Cardiff University, recently in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.
In China, the total money supply in cash fell to 3.7 percent and continues to decline, Matthews said.
“People use cash much less today than they did 10 to 20 years ago. The trend towards a cashless society is inevitable,” the professor said, noting that in the UK today cash accounts for around 2.9 per cent of total money in circulation. .
In less than 20 years and at impressive pace, China has closed the gap with Britain in terms of a cashless society, notes Matthews.
This has shown how quickly cashless payment and transaction technology has developed in China and how quickly Chinese society has accepted it, he said.
Matthews was surprised to see that in China, people who he expected to prefer using cash, such as the elderly, small business owners, and street vendors, were using their cell phones for transactions rather than cash.
“China is setting an example in digital payments for the rest of the world and really showing us that age is no barrier,” he added.
However, Matthews believed that no country could become a society without money at all. “There will always be a need for cash, and there is no way any government can legislate to remove it,” he added.
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