Regulating Blockchain? A Retrospective Assessment of China’s Blockchain Policies and Regulations

Blockchain technology, which has been actualized with the dawn of cryptocurrency use, is now being used in many fields such as finance, supply chain management, healthcare, insurance, entertainment, and intellectual property protection. The experiment and implementation of blockchain technology in many fields necessitate the need for applicable policies and regulations. Before articulating new policies or regulations, a critical step, as well as a missing step, is to assess how existing policies and regulations work. This article fills the gap by providing a retrospective assessment of China's existing block-chain policies and regulations. It first summarizes China's blockchain policies and regulations, and then assesses the impacts of these policies and regulations. The assessment consists of three steps by asking the following: (1) What were the problems before any policies and regulations were issued? (2) What are the objectives of the existing policies and regulations? (3) Have these objectives been fulfilled? Following this framework, the assessment begins by identifying three major problems in the blockchain space: (1) cryptocurrency and ICO-related crimes; (2) poor quality of early-staged blockchain products and services; and (3) a lack of consumer and investor protection mechanisms. The assessment then spots two primary objectives — market stability and safety, and technology innovation — by examining the government's policy and regulatory reaction to these problems. Each primary objective includes three secondary objectives. These six secondary objectives are used as indicators to assess policy and regulatory impacts, as well as to answer whether the primary objectives have been satisfied