China plans to largely complete a national blockchain network by 2030 under a five-year digital development plan published Friday by one of the country's top internet policy bodies.

The 15th Five-Year Plan for National Informatization, issued by the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, sets the country's digital development priorities and calls for deeper blockchain use in trade and finance in the Yangtze River Delta, as well as deployment at scale in manufacturing and agriculture in the Chengdu–Chongqing region in southwestern China. Five-year plans are China's central planning instrument for setting medium-term development priorities across the economy. The full text of the plan is available on the commission's website.

The Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission is a senior body within the ruling Communist Party that coordinates digital development policy. Its plan makes the 2030 completion target explicit for a project already included in China's national development plan released in March, and follows a joint policy from the Communist Party's central leadership and the State Council, published on Oct. 9, that called for the network's construction.

Beyond the buildout timeline, the new plan calls for stronger blockchain technical standards and greater use of the technology in data circulation and trading. Those provisions, alongside the regional deployments, are the concrete workstreams the plan sets out toward the 2030 target and serve as reference points for tracking the buildout as it progresses.

Mainland China bans cryptocurrency-related business activities, but it promotes blockchain technology as a national priority. In October 2019, President Xi Jinping called for greater investment in blockchain and identified the technology as an important area for developing China's own technological capabilities.

Source: Cointelegraph