Shanghai Makes Blockchain the Only Binding Target in Its Digital Plan

That makes blockchain the only number the municipal government has committed itself to. It lands in a city that is also the operating base for China's cross-border digital-yuan settlement platform, though the plan keeps the two apart: the blockchain mandate is aimed at trade and industry rather than finance. Two national programmes are now converging on the same city by different routes.

The plan, released by the Shanghai municipal government on 19 Aug, raises blockchain application coverage from 60% in 2025 to 100% by 2030 and marks it as the document's sole 'binding' indicator.

One binding target, ten aspirations

The other 10 targets are labelled 'anticipated', meaning outputs the plan expects rather than commitments it must meet. They include a 20% digital-economy core-industry share of regional GDP, up from 18% in 2025, and 3,000 public-data authorized operating products, up from 153.

The plan also calls for intelligent computing centres in the Shanghai districts of Pudong, Jinshan, Songjiang, Qingpu and Lingang to hold power usage effectiveness (PUE) below 1.2, with green power covering more than 80% of new sites. PUE is a data-centre efficiency ratio, where a lower value is better. The Qianfan low-earth-orbit satellite constellation, Shanghai's answer to Starlink, and 6G trial networks are to reach commercial deployment.

By contrast, the one binding target is also the least defined. The indicator table doesn't footnote how the 60% baseline was reached, and the safeguard-measures section sets no metric for how "every industry category" will be counted, or by whom, in 2030.

Where the mandate actually lands

The definition gap has not slowed the buildout. The plan lays the mandate onto two anchor tracks: the Shanghai hub of the national blockchain network, and trade digitalization.

The hub track calls for upgrades to privacy-computing hardware and cross-cloud node deployment. Trade digitalization is where the plan names target scenarios: electronic bills of lading, blockchain letters of credit, export tax rebates, single-window customs, bulk commodity trading and global supply-chain management.

The plan also assigns specialized blockchain infrastructure to individual districts: automotive distribution in Pudong, bulk commodities in Putuo, shipping supply chains in Hongkou, carbon-tracking platforms in Baoshan, transparent automotive supply chains in Jiading and express logistics in Qingpu.

Financial services are one strand among many. Shanghai also hosts e-CNY Centre International Co. Ltd, the firm established and managed by the People's Bank of China's (PBOC) Digital Currency Institute, which runs the Cross-border e-CNY Transfer Services (CBETS) platform and signed direct participant agreements with 26 banks in June, including the China subsidiary of Standard Chartered, the London-headquartered bank that does most of its business in Asia. CBETS is one of two PBOC-led cross-border digital-yuan networks, alongside mBridge, the multilateral CBDC arrangement that settled close to 500bn yuan ($69bn) between June 2024 and the end of 2025.

Four policy documents in 13 days

Shanghai's plan is the fourth Chinese policy document on adjacent tracks in 13 days. On 6 Aug, Guangdong's commerce department opened its five-year draft for the free trade zone for consultation, foregrounding cross-border pilots of the e-CNY, the central bank digital currency China began piloting in 2020.

The PBOC published its own 15th Five-Year reform and development plan on 10 Aug, listing steady development of the e-CNY among its core tasks for 2026 to 2030. On 17 Aug, the central bank added eight commercial lenders to its domestic e-CNY operator roster, taking that network, separate from CBETS, to 30 banks.

Those three documents stay within the finance-and-CBDC layer. Shanghai's plan binds the city across every industry category.