Smarter Cards: The Chinese Citizen Identification Program
by The roll out of China’s new citizen ID program has turned the country with the world’s largest population into the largest market for RFID and electronic ID documents.
Overview
The business of automatic identification technologies is about billions. We deal in a marketplace in which it is commonplace to talk about billions of tags and billions of dollars in sales, with forecasts for many more billions of each to come as the projections for RFID around the globe come true faster than projected. Still, perhaps the most import billions of all comes from China, where what industry analysts have categorized as the single biggest RFID project carried out to date has taken place – involving $6 billion and one billion tags.
The China Card
With just over 1.3 billion people, China is the world’s most populated country, comprising approximately a fifth of the world’s population. This summer, the world’s attention turned to China as the 2008 Olympic Games were a showcase for the country to demonstrate the economic progress that has positioned it for prominence in the 21st-century world. Yet, the Olympics was an important milestone in the history of not just The People’s Republic of China, but that of RFID as well. In fact, the event may come to be viewed as an inflection point for both the country and auto-ID technology. This is because the country targeted the start of the Olympics in August 2008 as the deadline to have approximately one billion adult Chinese citizens issued what the government termed its “second generation” national ID card. With the need for one billion RFID-enabled cards and the RFID infrastructure needed to support their issuance and use, the Chinese government has literally propelled their country to the forefront of the global RFID market.
Since 1990, the Chinese government has pushed what is commonly called the “Golden Projects,” an effort for smart cards to be used for payment and identification across all government agencies. The Taipei, Taiwan-based Market Intelligence Center found that while the Chinese government’s direct spend on Golden Projects has exceed $10 billion over the past decade and a half, the true spending by organizations across China to conform to the push for smart cards has reached over $100 billion. China’s central and local governments have been leaders in the use of smart cards for everything from driver licenses to transit cards. The biggest program by far, however, has been the national ID card program.
Image via Wikipedia
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