China Reaffirms Crypto Prohibition and Puts Stablecoins in Focus

The People’s Bank of China published an account on November 29, 2025, of a multi-agency meeting that reaffirmed mainland China’s prohibitive policy toward virtual currencies and placed unusual emphasis on stablecoins. The central bank said speculative activity and associated illegal conduct had resurfaced, creating new challenges for financial-risk controls.

The meeting itself occurred on November 28, 2025. Its conclusions became part of the public regulatory record when the PBOC released its statement on November 29. That chronology matters: this was not the announcement of a newly enacted ban, but a coordinated restatement of an existing policy accompanied by a call for stronger monitoring and enforcement.

What the statement changed—and what it did not

Officials from 13 bodies attended, according to the PBOC’s participant list. They included the central bank, public-security and cyberspace authorities, the country’s highest court and procuratorate, financial and securities regulators, the state foreign-exchange authority, and several economic and legal ministries.

The PBOC reiterated that virtual currencies were not legal tender, did not possess the legal status of fiat currency and could not circulate as money in market transactions. It also repeated the position that virtual-currency-related business activities constituted illegal financial activities.

Those principles substantially continued the framework established by the PBOC and nine other departments in 2021. The November 29 statement did not identify a new statute, announce a named enforcement case, specify penalties, or establish an implementation deadline. Its immediate significance instead came from the breadth of the agencies assembled and the central bank’s assertion that activity had begun to reappear despite earlier crackdowns.

Why stablecoins were singled out

Stablecoins received a distinct warning. The PBOC classified them as virtual currencies and said that, under conditions existing on November 29, they could not effectively satisfy customer-identification and anti-money-laundering requirements. It identified money laundering, fundraising fraud and illicit cross-border transfers as potential uses.

That language mattered because stablecoins occupy a different practical position from volatile assets such as bitcoin. Tokens designed to track a sovereign currency can function as trading collateral, settlement instruments or channels for transferring value across platforms and borders. The PBOC’s focus therefore connected crypto policy to payment oversight, capital-flow monitoring and financial-crime controls rather than treating the issue solely as retail speculation.

The statement did not establish that every stablecoin or transaction lacked compliance controls. It expressed the Chinese authorities’ contemporaneous regulatory assessment and supplied no transaction-level evidence or quantified estimate of illicit use.

Institutional and market context

The mainland stance contrasted with the licensing approach adopted in Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance had entered into force on August 1, 2025, establishing supervision and licensing for specified stablecoin activities, including anti-money-laundering requirements. The comparison showed two different regulatory methods operating within China’s broader jurisdictional setting: prohibition and suppression on the mainland, versus a permissioned framework with regulatory guardrails in Hong Kong.

For crypto companies and intermediaries, the November 29 signal was consequently operational rather than merely rhetorical. The PBOC directed agencies to improve coordination, legal frameworks and information sharing, while strengthening oversight of both information flows and capital flows. That language indicated attention to the infrastructure through which virtual-currency activity could reach mainland users.

Limits of the event-day record

Neither the PBOC statement nor the contemporaneous reports supplied a measured market reaction, enforcement total, stablecoin-flow estimate or named corporate target. No reliable event-specific price attribution can therefore be made from these records. The defensible conclusion for November 29, 2025, is narrower: China’s central bank publicly reaffirmed the mainland prohibition, said speculation was resurging and elevated stablecoin compliance and cross-border-transfer risks within a coordinated enforcement agenda.