China rolls out new 100 yuan banknotes, with stronger anti-forgery features

2015-11-12

A new version of China’s largest-denomination banknote flooded into the market on November 12, with a few early birds who withdrew cash from banks and automatic teller machines rushing to social media sites to share pictures of the new 100 yuan bill.

■ The new 100 yuan banknote, issued on November 12, includes a number of high-tech features to curb forgeries

“My Mr Dreamy [Chairman Mao Zedong] has a new photo album out,” read a top-voted comment on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter.

The portrait of the Great Helmsman, as Mao is also known, adorns one side of all banknotes of the currency, officially called renminbi.

The release of the high-tech note is the latest move by China’s central bank to tackle a serious problem of forgeries.

This is the third edition of the fifth series of renminbi introduced in 1999. Like the second edition issued in 2005, the latest version adds anti-counterfeiting features like colour-changing ink, an additional serial number, a new security line, and unevenly printed patterns of the Great Hall of the People on the note.

While notes from 1999 and 2005 are still circulating in the market, the People’s Bank of China is gradually collecting and destroying the used and broken notes through commercial banks.

The old and used notes will be pulverised in machines and compressed into paper bricks – red for 100 yuan notes and blue for 10 yuan notes – to make sure that they cannot be reconstructed, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The destroyed renminbi also contribute to electricity production. A truckload of smashed notes weighing 30 tonnes provides enough energy to generate , 30MWh of electricity, almost twice the energy in other biofuels such as rice straw, the report wrote.

“We have used pulverised banknotes to produce electricity for more than a year,” a fuel specialist from Jiangsu was quoted as saying.

Source: South China Morning Post