November 18, 2025 | The Wall Street Journal
China’s Myanmar Project Could End U.S. Sanctions
The digital currency would operate outside Swift but still have access to American banks.
November 18, 2025 | The Wall Street Journal
China’s Myanmar Project Could End U.S. Sanctions
The digital currency would operate outside Swift but still have access to American banks.
Excerpt
A quiet financial experiment in Myanmar could upend the power of U.S. sanctions worldwide. Documents we’ve recently reviewed show China is helping Myanmar’s military junta build a digital payments system that can move money beyond Washington’s reach—an apparent test run for how Beijing’s financial technology can shield rogue regimes from U.S. pressure.
The project’s backbone is China’s digital yuan, or e-CNY. Beijing’s central bank issues this electronic money via authorized banks, and users access it via apps. Unlike private payment systems like PayPal or Alipay, a central-bank digital currency allows the issuer to see every transaction in real time and even decide how that money can be spent. In Myanmar the documents show that Chinese engineers are adapting this model to create an electronic kyat, Myanmar’s national currency, using infrastructure from Huawei and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest bank. (Huawei, ICBC and the Central Bank of Myanmar didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
Mr. Swift is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Economic and Financial Power and a retired U.S. diplomat who served in Myanmar, 2015-19. Mr. Turnell is a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute. He served as an economic policy adviser to State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar and was a political prisoner there, 2021-22.