China’s Communist Party mouthpiece launches NFT research project to ‘guide’ digital art development

People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, has launched an NFT research project to “guide the orderly development of digital art” as the country’s NFT industry remains cautious amid mixed regulatory signals.

A new academy, called the People’s Lingjing Research Institute, has been created as a joint venture between the paper’s corporate entity and Sinofaith, a Shanghai-based intellectual property rights company.

The academy will study legal questions, technical standards and regulatory models for “the process of digitising artworks”, the People’s Daily said on Sunday.

Lingjing, or spiritual terrain, is the Chinese translation of “virtual reality” attributed to Qian Xuesen, known as the father of China’s space and missile programs.

People’s Daily launched Lingjing in January as a vehicle to promote its own digital collectibles, a term used to describe NFTs in China as the latter remains in a regulatory grey area. While global mainstream NFTs trade on public blockchains with cryptocurrencies, China’s digital collectibles are mostly based on centrally-controlled blockchains and are sold in yuan.

Through China’s digital publishing system and censorship mechanisms, the academy’s research lab will explore the “content regulation model” for the issuing of digital artworks, and guide the market’s “orderly development”, according to People’s Daily. It will also explore issuing digital collectibles overseas to promote Chinese culture.