Shanghai’s 5-year plan calls for the use of a metaverse in public services, entertainment, businesses, and industrial manufacturing. Shanghai is China’s most crowded city. It is seeking ways to use a metaverse to offer public services in the coming five years.
Notably, the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology’s 5-year development plan for the electronic information sector listed four frontiers for exploration, and one of them is the metaverse.
Based on a CNBC report, the paper is known for promoting the metaverse’s use in business offices, public services, social leisure, industrial manufacturing, production safety, and electronic games. The commission aims to encourage more study and development of the underlying technologies, including real-time interactions, sensors, and blockchain technology.
China’s growing interest in new technology has been the subject of debate in recent years. Its efforts to create a CBDC and its use of digital biometric hardware wallets for the digital Yuan have enabled it to become the leader in the issuance of a central bank digital currency.
In March 2021, China’s State Council published its 5-year development plan that features most of these same fronts for exploration. Based on previous reports, the term ‘blockchain’ appeared for the first time in China’s 14th five-year plan. That plan was contained in a document that outlines the nation’s economic goals for the coming five years, running from 2021 to 2025.
Buy Crypto NowThe Metaverse In China
In that context, the metaverse has now become a major area of interest for most huge firms in recent months. Facebook changed its name to Meta in October 2021 to benefit from the popularity of the term metaverse.
Despite the People’s Bank of China’s (PBoC) warning on nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and the metaverse in November, more than 1,000 Chinese firms have already filed tens of thousands of trademark applications that reference this term. Over 1,360 Chinese firms have already applied for 8,534 trademarks, based on the South China Morning Post.
Chinese firms are currently in the process of developing metaverse technologies, with Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba among the big firms that are aggressively working on related projects. In the past week, Baidu introduced its XiRang metaverse app that is expected to fully launch in six years.