I don’t know if you’re familiar with the TV series “Black Mirror” in China, but if you’re not you’ll really want to watch the episode “Nosedive”.
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You really don’t get it, do you? Pretty much NOTHING of this kind China happens in without state sanction, even if it is limited to an eyebrow being raised or lowered. They don’t need to revoke the cash payment laws, simply wait until they are irrelevant and then conclude the people have spoken and then ‘realise’ they do not need that law any more.
(Plus what @DavidVincent said.) ETA and seeing the rest of that conversation… they do not NEED to encourage it, just let it happen by not enforcing the cash payment law.
But I’m not sure I needed any additional reasons not to ever travel to China again, so there’s that at least.
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You certainly don’t do business without state sanction in China. I remember laughing with one ultra-capitalist American businessman I know who went there to start a company, only to discover that his new “partner” was a representative of the People’s Liberation Army.
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Exactly. Africa has many places where credit cards were not available before mobiles were. Mobile payments took off there far more than credit cards simply because when non-cash payments became a thing mobiles were there and convenient and the credit card infrastructure was not. Maybe China had a similar effect in that merchants who never took credit cards did suddenly realise they could take mobile payments more easily.
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It’s the leapfrog effect. African countries have been doing payments and banking via feature-phone services instead of cash for a while now. Given China’s imperialist ambitions in Africa, I’m sure they’re already pushing more surveillance-friendly cheap smartphones into that market.
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Interestingly, Germany is quite the opposite: most places prefer cash, and during the course of a normal day you are very likely to find a place (or two, or three) that won’t accept cards, so you have to carry a lot of cash on you at all times. In talking with people, there does seem to be an awareness that it’s a more private, secure system to pay in cash.
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I’m pretty skeptical of massive conspiracy theories in which The Evil State is pulling all the strings, but… this is pretty on-brand for China’s government.
Not abolishing the law that nobody is enforcing would be the smart play, from that standpoint. If you have 95% of the people using surveillable apps for 95% of their purchases, your surveillance state is working beautifully. In a country of a billion people, you don’t need or even want perfect optics into every moment of everyone’s life. It’s more than enough to get big-picture indicators, and if there’s a problem, then you can drill down on the troublemakers, using good old-fashioned shoe-leather policing if necessary.
The idea behind the panopticon isn’t to tamp down every bad act or rebellious outburst in real time. It’s to make people just a little too nervous to commit them in the first place. Eventually it becomes more or less unthinkable. Abolishing the cash law would just call attention to the degree of manipulation.
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In a better world, I’d like to see central banks issue their own cryptocurrencies with the goal of ensuring privacy along with efficiency. I doubt that will happen, but it’s nice to think about.
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You bet! They’re not just buying all that land and building all that infrastructure merely as a hedge against not being able to feed their own population in the future. Oh no.
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Like I said
THIS!
The purpose of the panopticon is primarily to modify and direct behaviour - to deliver self-censorship, reducing the resources needed to actually review everyone. But AI and algorithms make reviewing everyone a cinch anyway.
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It’s not just China that is encouraging cashlessness. Sweden is also becoming more and more cashless, mostly out of convenience.
Now, Swedish society is freer than Chinese society (and the ‘encouragement’ toward refusing cash is far less onerous) but the ability of a government to track the purchases of its citizens and visitors is not limited to dictatorial regimes like China. IMO, it looks more and more like the future of individual transactions everywhere around the world.
There are some significant positives to this trend. And some onerous possibilities…
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This isn’t a coincidence. Germany’s history has provided some very clear lessons about the dangers of a surveillance society, and the need for privacy and freedom of travel and freedom of expression is deliberately very ingrained. It’s part of the culture that was deliberately designed into the BRD by the occupying powers.
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We’re already most of the way there. If you don’t take any loans, your credit rating will be terrible. Your credit rating can actually drop from paying off a loan.
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Define convenience. 
There is nothing more convenient than cash as far as I, the customer, am concerned. The retailers, etc? Their convenience is not my problem until they make it so, and if they do, my custom will go elsewhere, while it can.
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Right. I have the highest possible credit rating (lucky me, and I only looked for the first time ever very recently) but the same page also tells me my eligibility for the very best loan rates and credit cards is medium at best. Go figure. (Yes, I know the answer is that having and properly servicing debt is what makes one the best candidate to get more…)
As a woman, I find it inconvenient to have to carry more than a nominal amount of cash, especially if I know I’ll be seen in public pulling the wad out of my wallet to pay for things. Cash is preferred by pickpockets/robbers, because it’s untraceable. Plus, if I’m robbed, a credit card can be canceled but my cash is gone forever.
Also, it’s easier to keep track of what I spent, when I spent it, and on what.
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Since at least 2007…
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Plenty of African governments would love that sort of surveillance even if the Chinese weren’t involved - places like Uganda and Tanzania spring to mind.
I was at a UN security conference in Kampala a few years ago and was berated by a very senior Ugandan police official for the UK government’s refusal to help them identify gay telecom users (homosexuality is still illegal in much of East Africa). People like that in charge of a comprehensive surveillance system? [shudder]
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While here in the US, when I go to fill up my gas tank, I’m sometimes charged more per gallon for a “cashierless” transaction via credit card, than if paying by cash and involving the “labor” of a cashier. 
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I guess that’s a possibility, although China’s well-documented style of governance seems to indicate a lack of shyness when it comes to surveillance and its wholesale use, and I don’t think even China’s political leaders believe that Joe Citizen would actually be put at ease by the seeming ability of merchants to take cash. Given everything so far, I believe it’s more likely that the cash law has not been abolished because the state wants to see who ‘dares’ to use cash (a possible indicator of suspicious behavior given a pervasively cashless economy); any related merchants may feel – compelled – to report cash transactions.
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