New Chinese Blockchain Pivot as Beijing Vows to Train 500,000 ‘Experts’

China is gearing up for another blockchain technology boost after pledging to train half a million new “experts” to work in the sector.

Blockchain was earmarked as a growth sector by China’s President Xi Jinping in 2018.

In the years that followed, blockchain wages increased in the country.

But in recent years, Chinese blockchain fervor has waned.

However, Beijing seems keen to stop this.

According to China Youth Daily, Beijing has opened a new National Blockchain Research Center, after plans to launch the center were unveiled last week.

The center has been charged with training “500,000 blockchain professionals.”

It has also been told to ensure that blockchain technology plays “a central role” in the Chinese “digital economy”.

The center has been established in collaboration with the Ministry of Science and Technology.

And it has been told to work together with universities and research institutes across the country.

IT companies will also be asked to work alongside the centre.

China’s Latest Blockchain Pivot: Why the Urgency?

Beijing has also unveiled plans to launch a “national” blockchain network solution.

This solution, the ministry said, will connect existing blockchain protocols and “provide support to other industries.”

Professor Zheng Zhi Ming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics argued that the center needed to tackle the issue of “block chain islands”.

Zheng explained that these “islands” had emerged due to the fact that different companies and sectors had spent the past few years building their own, individual, closed-chain blockchain networks.

China banned most forms of crypto-related activity in nationwide crackdowns carried out in 2017 and 2021.

As such, developers cannot work on decentralized public networks like Ethereum.

Instead, blockchain professionals must work on private networks.

This phenomenon has effectively excluded Chinese businesses from the crypto and non-fungible token (NFT) sectors.

Zheng spoke of an “uneven underlying technology network.”

The academic also said a “fragmented technology ecology” had emerged, with “different blockchain applications.”

The professor said:

“The phenomenon of “blockchain islands” is becoming more and more serious. This new type of information island phenomenon has seriously hindered the development of the digital economy.”

But the academic claimed:

“Building the National Blockchain Technology Center […] will improve significantly [Chinese] innovation capabilities and core competitiveness. It will help China rise to the top in the development of the global digital economy.”