How American Taxpayers Funded a Substantial Portion of China’s Fintech Rise

In just 10 years, China went from fintech follower to global leader.

A worker packs up new smartphone devices at the end of the production line at Huawei's production campus in Dongguan City, Guangdong Province, China, on April 11, 2019. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Commentary

China is now the world’s top filer of financial technology patent applications within the past decade, surpassing even the United States.

Chinese banks and technology companies are leading patent filings and expanding their influence in digital finance, strengthening China’s competitiveness in payments, lending, wealth management, and cryptocurrencies.

How did this happen?

The Numbers Don’t Lie

The data is now unambiguous.

The broader patent picture reinforces just how dominant Beijing has become. China filed 1.8 million patent applications in 2024—nearly half of all global filings—and more than three times the number submitted in the United States.

But it gets worse.

In AI, which is the engine of next-generation fintech, the gap is even more alarming. China accounted for approximately 61–70 percent of global AI patents granted as of 2022–2023, with approximately 300,000 AI patent applications in 2024 alone.

Unless something changes, that level of dynamism is unlikely to change in the near future.

The Theft Factor: How China Acquired Western Knowledge

One factor that the establishment press tends to ignore or under report is the level of theft that has enabled China’s rise to fintech leadership. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that it hasn’t been organic innovation driven by free markets and entrepreneurial risk-taking that’s put China on top.

Rather, a significant portion of China’s technological acceleration was built on stolen technologies and intellectual property that comprise the foundation of fintech innovation.

To be clear, China has operated on and thrived from industrial and intellectual thievery valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of ill-gotten technologies year after year, decade after decade.

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) state-directed, multi-vector acquisition strategy combines stolen Western intellectual property with massive government subsidies and long-term national planning.

The results are formidable, to say the least.

Crime Does Pay

The upshot is that China has built a fintech arsenal with both economic and strategic implications that Washington has been far too slow to reckon with.

The costs to America alone are staggering.

A congressional estimate placed the cost of Chinese intellectual property infringement at $225 billion to $600 billion yearly. According to a CNBC survey, 1 in 5 corporations say China has stolen their intellectual property.

And yet, this isn’t new information.

Since 2000, China has been associated with 90 cyber espionage campaigns—30 percent more than Russia—with each instance targeting multiple businesses that overlap priority industries specified in the CCP’s Made in China 2025 plan.

In 2020, then FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed Chinese economic espionage amounted to one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history. According to the Dyadic Cyber Incident and Campaign Dataset, the Chinese regime is the world’s most egregious actor in terms of cyber espionage targeting private firms.

Highly Coordinated, Highly Profitable Systematic Theft

China’s espionage ecosystem is both systemic and strategic.

From state intelligence agencies to nominally private firms, Beijing coordinates cyber, human, and corporate channels to steal U.S. industrial and defense technologies. Programs such as Thousand Talents and new “foreign expert” schemes have turned engineers and researchers inside U.S. firms into conduits for trade secrets.

The total cost of the CCP’s theft of American intellectual property amounts to as much as $6,000 for the average American family of four after taxes. From February 2021 to December 2024, more than 60 CCP-related espionage cases were documented across 20 states.

In short, American taxpayers and shareholders funded a substantial portion of China’s fintech rise—they just didn’t know they were writing the check.

Beijing’s Industrial Policy of Made in China 2025 and State-Directed Fintech Development

Theft alone doesn’t explain China’s fintech dominance.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s flagship program, Made in China 2025, was unveiled in 2015 and was designed to comprehensively upgrade Chinese industry. It emphasizes quality over quantity, optimizing the structure of Chinese industry, and capturing the larger-margin share of the value chain. Fintech was always at the center of that plan.

China’s recently completed 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) and the broader Digital China strategy explicitly positioned digital finance, data infrastructure, and platform economies as core drivers of growth.

What’s more, the state doesn’t just set direction in China; it funds and oversees the execution of technological investment.

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has prioritized fintech development funding through its Fintech Development Plan (2022–2025), focusing on regulatory technology, data governance, and inclusive finance. These frameworks have created a coordinated ecosystem where fintech is not simply a disruptive force but an integrated component of national economic planning.

Just as important, government subsidies, state-owned bank financing, and captive domestic markets of 1.4 billion consumers gave Chinese fintech giants like Tencent, Alibaba, and ICBC a protected laboratory unavailable to any Western competitor.

Plus, there are no antitrust breakups when the Party decides a sector is strategic. There is only acceleration.

We’re seeing the combined effect of these factors in China’s rapid rise to global fintech dominance. But it doesn’t end there.

The Digital Yuan Is Beijing’s Ultimate Fintech Weapon Against the Dollar

The crown jewel of China’s fintech strategy is not a payment app or even a bilateral currency relationship with trading partners. It’s the digital yuan, and it’s nothing less than a monetary weapon designed to erode the global dominance of the U.S. dollar.

The digital yuan threatens to disrupt SWIFT, the U.S.-dominated interbank messaging system, by offering faster, lower-cost, and more transparent settlements.

That growth is enabled in large part by China’s fintech advances and dominance. In fact, the Chinese fintech market is projected to grow from $51.28 billion in 2025 to $107.55 billion by 2030.

For countries excluded from the U.S.-led SWIFT international payments system, such as Russia and Iran, it provides an alternative aligned with BRICS economic interests.

To enhance the benefits of using the digital yuan, in December 2025, the PBOC announced it would begin paying interest on the electronic Chinese yuan, making it the world’s first interest-bearing CBDC. With a digital yuan now paying interest, it directly addresses a key barrier to retail adoption.

The strategic implication is not subtle. Every transaction settled in e-CNY rather than dollars is a dollar removed from America’s financial reach. Every nation that adopts China’s payment rails becomes financially dependent on Beijing’s infrastructure and subject to its surveillance.

What This Means Economically and Strategically

The economic consequences are already measurable.

China’s fintech dominance marks a turning point in global innovation, and the strategic consequences are only beginning to be felt across the financial world with regard to U.S. influence and control.

The nation that controls the world’s financial technology infrastructure controls who can transact, on what terms, and under whose observation. China is not just building fintech. It is building financial leverage over trade partners, debtor nations, and eventually, over the global payment system itself.

US Response Little, Too Late?

Washington has responded with export controls, Committee on Foreign Investment Reviews in the U.S. (CFIUS) reviews, and congressional hearings.

These are necessary but insufficient steps.

Furthermore, U.S. counterintelligence capacity is eroding. Shifts in FBI and DHS priorities have weakened the government’s ability to detect and disrupt Chinese theft just as Beijing’s efforts intensify.

The United States spent decades building the financial architecture of the modern world. China spent one decade learning how it worked, stealing what it needed, and building a replacement.

The countdown to China’s global financial dominance may be faster than imagined, and time is not on America’s side.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.