Coerced Cooperation and Passive Resistance: The Advocacy Coalition Dynamics in China’s Digital Currency Subsystem

The rapid evolution of global digital finance has made central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) a crucial issue in international monetary governance. By 2025, over 130 economies worldwide will be exploring CBDCs, but most remain cautious and are mainly in the research or limited pilot stages. In this context, China’s path is particularly exceptional: after long-term acquiescence in the de facto duopoly of Alipay and WeChat Pay, why did the state suddenly intervene strongly after 2019 and re-intervene in the core layer of digital financial infrastructure with the help of sovereign digital currency (e-CNY)? This article uses the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to explain this policy turn, arguing that Facebook’s Libra (Diem) in 2019 constituted a key external shock that significantly increased the potential threat of cryptocurrencies to China’s monetary sovereignty. Before external shocks, China’s digital currency policy subsystem maintained a relatively stable policy equilibrium between the Financial Stability Coalition (central bank and regulatory agencies) and Market Efficiency Coalition (financial technology platform). The emergence of Libra has strengthened the Financial Stability Coalition’s long-held policy core beliefs of monetary sovereignty and financial stability, allowing it to redefine their agenda within the framework of sovereign security, thereby breaking through their reliance on platform infrastructure. Based on the analysis of policy documents, official and corporate public discourse, and platform technical architecture from 2014 to 2024, this article identifies a mechanism of defensive mobilization and forced cooperation. After gaining agenda dominance, the Financial Stability Coalition repositions major digital platforms from autonomous market actors to infrastructure contractors within a two-tiered operating system. However, the Market Efficiency Coalition retains control over key implementation resources, including user interfaces, incentive structures, and the payment ecosystem, and guided by its policy core beliefs centered on efficiency, profit and data commercialization, adopts a passive resistance approach through minimal compliance, weakening the behavioral diffusion of e-CNY. This institutional victory, coupled with the gap in behavioral adoption reflects the resource asymmetry mechanism emphasized by the ACF: even when institutionally disadvantaged, a non-dominant coalition can still exert a substantial influence on policy implementation when it controls key implementation resources. This article makes contributions at two levels: at the empirical level, it reveals how states maintain monetary sovereignty and reconstructs infrastructure power in a platform-based environment; at the theoretical level, it demonstrates the role of external shocks, problem definition, and narrative competition in emerging policy subsystems, expanding the applicability of ACF in emerging technology issues.