The approaching Spring Festival, a traditional shopping season for Chinese people, surely makes the fight against counterfeit money more urgent.

But there is a much larger economic context for the battle. The country's long-term need to boost domestic consumption into a major growth engine makes it a pressing task for the central bank to come up with effective measures to crack down on counterfeit currency. A pre-holiday warning about high-quality fake banknotes is not enough to assure consumers that it is time to spend.

Fake 100-yuan notes, most starting with the serial number "HD90," have recently been found in more than 10 provinces and cities across the country.