PBOC former governor Zhou Xiaochuan

China's experimental digital yuan is not designed to replace the US dollar's global dominance. The digital yuan, also known as e-CNY or Digital Currency Electronic Payment, is primarily built on modernizing China's payment system and playing catch-up in the era of the digital economy and aims to raise efficiency, reduce costs and serve the retail payment segment in particular.

Efforts to modernize and digitize the yuan-denominated payment system would help in increasing the yuan's status. However, the yuan's internationalization is contingent upon the country's institutional and policy choices, and its reform and opening-up progress, he said, and technical factors are only helpful to some degree.