Chinese President Xi Jinping placed blockchain inside China’s strategic technology agenda during a May 28, 2018 address to the country’s leading science and engineering academies.
Speaking at the opening of conferences for the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering, Xi grouped blockchain with artificial intelligence, quantum information, mobile communications and the Internet of Things. He described those fields collectively as a new generation of information technologies producing faster breakthroughs in practical applications.
The statement mattered because it came from China’s highest political authority and linked blockchain to a broader program of technological self-reliance, research investment and industrial development. It did not, however, reverse China’s restrictions on cryptocurrency fundraising or authorize domestic digital-asset trading.
What the speech established
The contemporaneous Chinese-language transcript recorded the address on May 28 and identified Xi as the speaker. His discussion was substantially broader than blockchain: it covered life sciences, advanced manufacturing, energy, space, basic research, scientific institutions and the development of technical talent.
Within that framework, blockchain appeared as one of five representative information technologies. Xi argued that a new scientific and industrial revolution was reshaping the global economy and that China needed to secure greater control over critical technologies. He identified shortcomings in areas including high-end chips, foundational software and hardware, development platforms, algorithms, components and materials.
The speech therefore provided a national-level political signal, not a blockchain implementation plan. It named no protocol, cryptocurrency, funding amount, regulatory agency, laboratory, deployment deadline or technical standard. It also did not declare bitcoin legal tender, approve an exchange or endorse permissionless networks.
The policy distinction around cryptocurrency
That limitation was important in the regulatory environment of May 28, 2018. On September 4, 2017, seven Chinese authorities—including the People’s Bank of China and the securities, banking and insurance regulators—had classified token fundraising as unauthorized public financing and ordered such activity stopped. The notice specifically addressed fundraising through assets including bitcoin and ether.
Nothing in Xi’s May 28 remarks amended that notice. The evidence supports a distinction between state interest in blockchain as an information technology and official acceptance of privately issued cryptocurrencies or token sales. Treating the speech as a reversal of the 2017 restrictions would exceed what the record established.
The address nevertheless aligned with existing government policy. China’s national information-development plan for 2016 through 2020 had already included blockchain among technologies targeted for foundational research and forward-looking development. A State Council plan publicly released on May 24, 2018 also instructed the Guangdong Free Trade Zone to accelerate research and application involving blockchain and big data, subject to legal compliance.
Why the May 28 signal mattered
Xi’s intervention elevated the visibility of blockchain within an established policy trajectory. The institutional significance was not that China suddenly discovered the technology, but that the country’s president incorporated it into a high-level account of global technological competition and domestic innovation capacity.
For blockchain developers and companies, that created a clearer signal that research and controlled applications could fit national industrial priorities even while cryptocurrency financing and trading remained constrained. It also warned against using “blockchain support” as shorthand for “cryptocurrency approval”: the two positions coexisted in the contemporaneous record.
No market-price reaction is attributed to the speech. Cryptocurrency markets traded continuously across venues, and the sources reviewed do not provide a sufficiently controlled event window to separate the address from other influences on May 28. The verified development is institutional rather than quantitative: China’s president placed blockchain among strategically important emerging technologies without changing the event-day rules governing tokens or exchanges.
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