China is in the early stages of a battle to regulate technologies it does not like, and one area that has received particular attention is cryptography. This is because China was at ground zero for crypto mining in particular for a time, and the industry boomed before regulators began to take hold.

A year ago, China outlawed cryptocurrency trading, but now the People's Bank of China has issued an update via the country's popular WeChat platform (Thanks, The Register (opens in new tab)). Naturally, it is full of praise for the leadership of our good friend Xi Jinping, and covers several areas of finance as well as crypto.

All text quoted by the bank here is machine-translated and lightly edited for meaning.

The People's Bank of China refers specifically to the success of the "special remediation of Internet financial risks" with respect to Bitcoin, stating that it has "comprehensively cleaned up and rectified the financial order." If you are wondering what the special remediation is, the bank is talking about the closure of "some 5,000 P2P online lending institutions."

The P2P element is crucial in why the CCP hates crypto: peer-to-peer transactions are inherently difficult to control. The overall theme of this financial note is banking stability and how secure the Chinese financial system is. Of course, all of this is what one would expect a CCP bank to say about the CCP's economic policies; P2P transactions are not stable in this macro sense and are difficult to regulate. And the country wants top-down control over the systems its citizens use, especially the financial system.

The bank says it continues to "crack down" on what it calls "domestic virtual currency trading speculation" and further states that "Bitcoin trading volume within China has declined significantly, even globally." This does not specifically address how bitcoin mining has been affected. While the Chinese Communist Party's policies have undoubtedly affected this, the country is still responsible for just over 20% of bitcoin power consumption, according to Cambridge's bitcoin power consumption map.

Still, the bank finds that "the momentum of uncontrolled expansion and savage growth has been effectively curbed." It vows to continue its fight against crypto "pseudo-gold exchanges" and to "eliminate the regulatory vacuum." [But writing about how wonderfully well Xi Jinping and the CCP's policies are working is something that is done all the time. The crypto "ban" itself remains a hot topic, with many crypto assets still in China and lawsuits continuing (good luck, Chinese crypto fans). And it is only a small part, albeit a large one, of a broader effort to control elements of technology that the CCP fears will become too large to effectively control (Tencent, for example, has been systematically brought to its knees several times in recent years (Tencent, for example, has been systematically subjugated on several occasions in recent years).

With apologies to Pravda, bitcoin production in China has not really reached record levels. But whatever the Chinese central bank says, it is going on, and the battle to control it is far from over.