China Open Source Daily — 2026-11-01
On 2026-09-18 Beijing’s Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology and its Development and Reform Commission issued the Action Plan for Accelerating the Development of the Token Economy (2026-2028) — six dimensions, ten measures, first provincial-level token-economy policy in the country. Its two most institutional proposals are not subsidies: a graded evaluation standard for ’token factories’ scored on model-adaptation count, token throughput, first-token latency, cache hit rate and PUE; and a token distribution platform to be written into the new-infrastructure plan, offering developers one interface, model aggregation and metered settlement. Set beside that, two financing schemes already in operation: Beijing E-Town’s 2-billion-yuan token loans closed in mid-September through six banks, and Haizhu district’s guarantee-innovation product from August — both using token production and consumption as a credit signal for firms with high R&D and no collateral. And a consumer layer nobody planned: token packs sold like mobile data, token credit-card rewards, tokens handed out at dumpling restaurants, tokens resold on Xianyu, against a State Data Administration series that went from 100 billion daily tokens in early 2024 to 500 trillion by May 2026. The economics being assembled here is older than it looks: 词元 — word-plus-currency — was adopted as the official term in March 2026, and the last Chinese government to make a unit of consumption into a unit of account ran into a problem that Mises described in 1912 and that no rediscount window ever solved.