Telecommunications giant Huawei’s chief executive has said that the time is ripe for China’s government to preempt Facebook’s Libra.

Speaking in an interview with Italian media outlet L’economia, CEO Ren Zhengfei remarked that China has the capability to pursue such an undertaking. He was asked a question about U.S. global hegemony and Facebook’s issuance of an international currency specifically.

Ren was quoted as saying (according to a translation):

“Even China is able to issue such currencies, why wait for Libra? The strength of a state is greater than that of an Internet company.”

Ren was not necessarily looking to take his company toe-to-toe with the social media giant. Though his firm has made significant inroads in the blockchain space – including joining the Hyperledger consortium and releasing a blockchain-backed cloud service – he instead pointed to the advancements in blockchain technology made by the Chinese nation-state. 

In May, the People’s Bank of China hired blockchain experts in a move to widen its distributed network investments, useful for “large scale transactions,” bank representatives said at the time.

Additionally, while some members of China’s central bank have said that Libra’s deployment could negatively impact the country’ economy, Wang Xin, head of the research bureau at the People’s Bank of China, said the competition could propel the country to issue its own national cryptocurrency.

In fact, a few weeks after Libra was announced, searches on the China’s web search giant Weibo skyrocketed. This is in spite of the fact that Facebook has been banned in the country since 2009.

Ren’s statements were translated from Italian.

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