Digital yuan faces Olympics test

China is rolling out its digital yuan to athletes and spectators ahead of next month's Beijing Winter Olympics, the first major test of the virtual currency's appeal among foreigners.

Visitors can download an app or get a physical card that stores the digital yuan, or convert foreign bank notes into e-CNY at self-service machines, according to the Bank of China, a state lender and official partner of the games.

Qu Songming, a manager of the operations team of the Olympic Village in Beijing, said payment will be restricted to only a few methods. Notably Alibaba Group's (9988) Alipay and Tencent's (0700) WeChat Pay - which both support e-CNY - won't be available at the village.

Meanwhile, China plans to keep its 2022 quota for new infrastructure debt at last year's level of 3.65 trillion yuan(HK$4.46 trillion), as the government looks to balance debt sustainability with the need to support economic growth.

UBS expects China would speed up issuance of local bonds in the first half of the year to support infrastructure investment, with an estimated net issuance of 4.3 trillion yuan for the whole year.

Citic Securities (6030) said the country may issue 1 trillion yuan special national debt this year to offset the 950.2 billion yuan bonds that are set to expire.

Elsewhere, India is considering easing scrutiny on certain foreign direct investment after rules mainly aimed at China created a bottleneck for inflows with proposals worth US$6 billion (HK$46.8 billion) stuck amid the red tape.