China: the world's largest trade engine, a hard line on digital assets at home, and the UAE as the settlement hub in between
China is the most important and the most delicate market in this series. It is the largest exporter on earth and the single biggest trading partner of dozens of countries we focus on. It also takes one of the hardest official lines against digital assets of any major economy. The interesting story is not inside China's borders — it is in how Chinese trade with the wider world settles, and the central role the United Arab Emirates plays in it.
Let me be careful and precise here, because China is a market where the distinction between what is permitted and what is not matters enormously.
Orientation: the scale of the trade
The starting point is simply the size of Chinese trade. China is the manufacturing hub for much of the world, including for nearly every emerging market in this series — the importer in Nigeria, the manufacturer in Pakistan, the trader in Egypt are, very often, buying from China. Chinese goods flow to Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia in enormous volumes, and someone has to settle all of those transactions.
A great deal of that settlement runs through the United Arab Emirates. UAE–China bilateral trade reached roughly $100 billion in 2024, and the UAE has become China's primary non-oil hub for the wider region, with a large share of China's regional exports transiting through it. Dubai, in other words, is not just our home base — it is one of the central waypoints for Chinese trade with the developing world.
The hard line at home
China's domestic stance is unambiguous and restrictive. The country banned digital-asset trading and mining in 2021, and has more recently taken a firm line against stablecoins within its borders, treating them as a threat to monetary control and capital management. There is no domestic licensing regime of the kind we have seen emerging in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, or Kazakhstan. Inside mainland China, this activity is not a regulated industry; it is prohibited.
That hard line is rooted in China's strict capital controls — the rules that limit how money may move in and out of the country. Beijing guards those controls closely, and dollar stablecoins, which move value across borders without passing through the banking system, sit in direct tension with them.
The reality in the trade flows
And yet. Precisely because moving dollars across China's borders through the formal system is slow and tightly controlled, Chinese exporters have increasingly turned to USDT to settle international trade. Reporting from Hong Kong over-the-counter desks indicates that monthly USDT trade settlement by Chinese clients has risen several-fold since 2021. The pattern is consistent with everything else in this series: where formal cross-border settlement is constrained, dollar stablecoins fill the gap — here, not for a collapsing currency, but to move value across a tightly controlled border efficiently.
This activity is large, but it is also informal and operates in a legal grey area with respect to China's own rules. I want to be clear that the opportunity for a regulated business is not, and cannot be, to facilitate the circumvention of any country's capital controls. That is not a business worth building.
Where the legitimate opportunity actually is
The legitimate opportunity sits outside China, at the hub. Consider the flow from the destination's side rather than the source's. An importer in Lagos, Karachi, or Cairo needs to pay a Chinese supplier. That importer is operating in a market where dollar stablecoins are an accepted or emerging settlement tool, and the trade is very often routed through the UAE. The role of a regulated treasury-infrastructure business is to serve that importer and that UAE-based intermediary — providing compliant, auditable settlement and liquidity for legitimate trade into the China supply chain, anchored in the UAE's regulated framework.
In that framing, China is less a market we work inside and more the gravitational centre of the trade flows we serve from the UAE. The Gulf hub exists, in large part, precisely because it is the neutral, well-regulated place where the rest of the world's trade with China can be financed and settled. That is the opportunity: not China's domestic market, which is closed, but the vast UAE-centred settlement layer around China's trade with everyone else.
What it means for treasury infrastructure
China sharpens a principle that runs through this entire series: compliance is not a constraint on the opportunity, it is the opportunity. The undisciplined version of this business chases informal Chinese settlement flows and ends up on the wrong side of capital-control rules. The disciplined version positions at the UAE hub, serves legitimate importers and exporters in our focus corridors, and provides the regulated settlement layer for their trade with the Chinese supply chain.
That is a large opportunity precisely because China is so central to global trade. You do not need to operate inside China to benefit from the fact that half the developing world buys from it — you need to be the regulated settlement layer at the hub where that trade is financed.
My read
China is the market to understand most carefully and to approach most conservatively. Its domestic door is closed and likely to stay closed, and no serious operator should build a thesis on circumventing its controls. But its trade is the engine behind much of the demand this series describes, and the UAE's position as the hub for that trade is a genuine, durable structural advantage.
So I treat China not as a target market but as the centre of gravity. The work is to be the compliant, regulated settlement infrastructure at the Gulf hub through which the world's legitimate trade with China increasingly flows. That is where the size of China becomes an opportunity rather than a risk.