This English version may have been machine-generated from the Chinese original and may not convey the original meaning accurately.
Deutsche Welle reports that the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs has approved a draft regulatory framework for the digital euro, with pilot programs expected in 2027. Notably, this design established two points of reference from the outset: it must avoid both American-style policy volatility and “Chinese-style regulation”—that is, the infringement of citizens’ rights by a social credit system. The very invocation of this concept constitutes a silent yet pointed criticism of China’s digital yuan and the governance logic behind it.
The legislative process for the digital euro is worth examining closely. It must go through multiple procedures, including review by the European Parliament, consultations among member states, public consultation, and privacy-protection assessments. Every design detail—such as transaction traceability, offline payments, and holding limits—must be repeatedly weighed in public debate. Behind this lies the basic logic of the separation of powers and representative democracy: legislative and executive powers check each other, the media and civil society provide oversight throughout the process, and technical proposals must be accountable to voters.
By contrast, China’s digital yuan has followed an entirely different logic: led by the central bank, supported by local governments, and rolled out top-down across pilot cities. The public has had no meaningful opportunity to comment on its design, nor has any independent institution assessed its impact on the right to privacy. Even more alarming is that digital currency shares the same technological lineage as the social credit system, health codes, and big-data-based stability maintenance, together forming an infrastructure capable of precisely recording, scoring, and restricting citizens’ economic behavior. Reports indicate that public opinion outside China is broadly concerned that such systems could be used to impose targeted financial sanctions on specific groups—petitioners, dissidents, and religious believers—for example, by freezing accounts, restricting consumption, or cutting off their means of subsistence. This concern is not unfounded; it arises from a basic fact: in a system without judicial independence, freedom of the press, or oversight by opposition parties, technological power will ultimately incline toward whatever direction most benefits those in power, rather than the one most beneficial to citizens’ rights.
This is precisely the core of the issue. Technology itself is neutral—digital currency can improve payment efficiency and reduce transaction costs, and this is true anywhere in the world. What truly determines whether it becomes a tool of liberation or a tool of control is the institutional environment behind it. Europe is able to make “avoiding Chinese-style regulation” an explicit goal in designing the digital euro precisely because the EU contains a comprehensive system of checks and balances, including parliamentary accountability, judicial review, data-protection regulations such as the GDPR, and independent media. These mechanisms ensure that any proposal seeking to expand surveillance powers must pay a political price. China’s turn toward deeply binding the digital yuan to the social credit system, meanwhile, is rooted in the fact that power is unchecked under one-party rule: there are no elections that can remove those in power, no courts that can independently adjudicate citizens’ lawsuits against the government, and no media capable of exposing the black-box operations of technological abuse. As a result, every “advance” in technology may mean yet another contraction of the space for citizens’ freedoms.
It is worth reflecting on the fact that Europe’s experience demonstrates that vigilance is not futile—it can be transformed into concrete constraints in institutional design, such as limiting the central bank’s authority to access the details of individuals’ transactions, providing offline payment options to preserve a space for anonymity, and granting citizens control over their own data. These specific institutional arrangements arise from the long-accumulated practice of checks and balances in constitutional democracies, rather than from the benevolence of an enlightened leader. This also reminds us that protecting citizens’ rights has never been a technological issue, but a matter of political institutions.
When a country’s digital-currency design becomes a negative example used by the international community to warn others, “Do not do this,” that in itself is a resounding slap in the face to that country’s model of governance. Only by introducing constitutional democracy, the separation of powers, and judicial independence, and by ensuring that power is genuinely subject to citizens’ oversight, can technology serve human dignity rather than become a new kind of shackle for enslaving people.
News background: The original report on which this commentary is based can be found at Deutsche Welle: DW-WORLD.DE。