Visitors use digital yuan for payment at the 5th Digital China Summit in Fuzhou, East China's Fujian Province on July 24, 2022. Photo: Yin Yeping/GT

East China's Jiangsu Province recently released a plan for a pilot program to promote usage of the digital yuan in the local education sector, aiming to boost application scenarios such as fee payment and campus consumption.

The plan will focus on various aspects to deepen the use of digital yuan in the education sector, chinanews.com reported on Tuesday.

For instance, the plan proposed easing the digital yuan payment channel for all types of schools in Jiangsu including kindergartens, while setting up additional payment methods to improve the online and offline payment environment for digital yuan.

The plan will also encourage local schools to expand the coverage for use of digital yuan on campus and to connect the digital yuan with current school systems, aiming to continuously enrich the application scenarios.

The plan outlines a goal to make significant progress in covering major application scenarios such as fee payment and scholarship grants, while basically forming a complete digital yuan ecology in the education sector with wide coverage and efficient services.

Futian district in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, was the first area in the country to adopt digital yuan payment in the nation's education and training industry, allowing clients to use the digital yuan to prepay for education services, the Economic Daily reported on Tuesday.

Currently, the pilot program covers more than 30 educational institutions in Futian district, with prepayments made using digital yuan totaling nearly 2 million yuan ($288.930), according to the report.

China has been continuously expanding the application scenarios for the digital yuan through various industries.

Bank of Beijing's Shanghai branch successfully settled the nation's first transactions in the China Certified Emission Reduction scheme using digital yuan on May 5, according to media reports.

Changshu in Jiangsu will start to pay salaries for civil servants and staff at state-owned enterprises through digital yuan in May, stcn.com reported in April.

Global Times