Local Green Finance
Latest Report Release
Exploring Financial Pathways to Support the Development of Zero-Carbon Industrial Parks
The development of zero-carbon industrial parks has emerged as a strategic pillar for achieving China’s carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals. At the same time, it is generating substantial and increasingly diverse financing needs. According to incomplete statistics, China currently has more than 15,000 industrial parks, which collectively account for over 30% of the country’s total carbon emissions.[1] The transition from conventional industrial parks to zero-carbon parks represents not only a technological transformation but also a profound shift in investment logic and asset structures. Consequently, financing needs are becoming increasingly differentiated and multi-layered. However, traditional financial instruments remain misaligned in areas such as maturity matching, risk pricing, and asset identification, while policy frameworks and standards still contain gaps in several emerging sectors. How finance can accurately empower and proactively adapt to the needs of zero-carbon parks has therefore become a critical issue in enabling their large-scale deployment.
Why the Stablecoin System Constitutes an “On-Chain Iteration” of Traditional Shadow Banking
The core argument of this article is that the stablecoin ecosystem, built natively on blockchain technology, fully reproduces the core functions and risk characteristics of traditional shadow banking, thereby constituting an “on-chain iteration” of shadow banking. The analytical foundation of this argument lies in the principle of “functional equivalence”: regardless of technological form, once a financial activity performs bank-like functions such as credit intermediation, maturity transformation, and liquidity transformation while remaining outside prudential regulation, its essential nature becomes structurally analogous to shadow banking. This structural characteristic implies that the stablecoin system inherently contains systemic risks including runs, credit collapse, and market contagion. This perspective is increasingly echoed in academic literature, which has conceptualized the credit, maturity, and liquidity transformation activities conducted by stablecoin issuers and centralized exchanges as a new iteration of shadow banking.