On August 23, the Chinese local government body announced the Beijing Urban Sub-Center Metaverse Innovation and Development Action Plan for 2022 -2024, suggesting potential government approval for a new and upcoming space. 

According to the published document, the Beijing municipal department of Tongzhou District released the Web3 innovation plan. It noted, “In order to systematically promote the development of Metaverse-related industries in the sub-center of the city, create an urban technological innovation highland with distinctive digital characteristics, and help Beijing build a benchmark city for the digital economy, this action plan is specially formulated.” 

Previously in July, the Shanghai city government had revealed its plan for developing a 350 billion yuan (around $51 billion) metaverse industry by the end of 2025. 

The Shanghai Municipal Commission has brought in a notice to encourage the execution of the metaverse in sectors including social entertainment, industrial manufacture, public services, production safety, company offices, , and electronic gaming. 

According to local reports, Wuhan “aims to push the integration of the real economy with tech industries related to the metaverse, big data, and cloud computing”. 

While Hefei, a city in East China’s Anhui Province, said they will embrace upcoming industries including the superconductivity and metaverse. 

China’s tech giants like Tencent & Alibaba, are also planning to move into the metaverse with Baidu stating it would take six years before their metaverse is built fully. 

“Tencent’s NFT collector trading app ‘Magic Core’ has attracted widespread attention from collectors (even though NFTs currently sold can’t be traded second-hand and are not transferable as gifts),” Jing Daily says. 

Instead of more ‘digital collectibles’, Xinhua has published some 11 ‘NFTs’ which are not transferable and have no actual token that operates on a public blockchain, but just a jpeg. 

The metaverse in China will be a lot more controlled as their one-party state will not allow immutable publishing of images, words, or designs on the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) connected through a hash to the unchangeable and uncensorable blockchain. China has put jpegs on a centralized database and is calling it NFTs.