Chinese authorities have recently turned their attention to news sites and those reporting information on current news about cryptocurrencies.
Claiming a disruptive influence, the government has also prohibited some advertising through the staging of some crypto-related activities. This now includes locations such as hotels, shopping malls and office buildings, according to the Beijing News.
Apparently, such measures have been introduced in order to protect the Chinese yuan which has been under pressure for the US dollar for most of this year, resulting in falling value. The latest restrictions state the aim:
“To protect people’s property and safeguard the status of legal tender, to guard against money laundering risks and maintain the stability of the financial system, all shopping malls, hotels, restaurants, offices and other places shall not undertake any form of cryptocurrency-related promotion activities.”
At present, the restriction is lifted to an area of Beijing, Chaoyang District, with a population of around 6 million. The government appear to have been aggravated by recent crypto index fund BitUP’s promotional activities.
ICOs banned in China are increasingly coming under pressure and most of the big names have set up overseas to avoid becoming entangled in complicated government prohibitive regulations. Thus, any advertising relating to ICOs is quickly jumped on by the authorities in an attempt to eradicate ICOs from mainland China.
WeChat and Jinse use have both fallen under China’s regulatory axe, the latter with a readership of 350,000 a day including Asia Today. WeChat was “suspected of publishing information related to ICOs [initial coin offerings] and speculations on cryptocurrency trading”.
Just to show the government’s determination to stem the rising tide of ICOs, a conference which would have been happily entertained by any other nation was nipped in the bud earlier this year when the one-day event, dubbed the Global Fintech & Blockchain China Summit 2018, was halted as police raided the event evacuating all attendees and speakers, and then cancelling the afternoon’s keynote addresses.
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