It's all covered in the book. They got *banking licenses*. They are legit banks, not just payment tech companies. The primary reason the Chinese keep accounts at the brick and mortar banks is for depositing and withdrawing cash, otherwise they transfer it to their WeChat/AliPay accounts.

It's been a successful strategy to rein in the banks and push their payments tech forward to boost their economy. They rolled out cell towers to even the remote villages, had cheap feature phones that could do the payments, and suddenly banked millions of unbanked Chinese very quickly.

People in remote villages now had access to sell their goods online. The velocity of money exploded. They did like $42T USD worth of payments in their economy in one year. It blows away America's circular economy.

The banks lost access to billions in transaction fees per year and they lost the metadata on each transaction. They took away multiple revenue streams from the banks through this. This is the iron fist slapping down the banks who were getting too powerful and also manipulating their Big Tech into doing their bidding. It gave the government better real-time access to transaction data in exchange for a nice chunk of profit until they roll out the CBDC widely.

Go pick up a copy it's really enlightening.