As the digital development of enterprises globally begin to move from the digital transformation (DX) era to the digital business era, the government of China unveiled its plan for the country’s digital development. This further clarifies their goals for China’s overall digital development, sharing for the first time their framework of “2522”, complete with guarantees of implementation. The timely release of this plan, which also sets China’s development goals for 2025 and 2035, will help cope with the current economic downward pressure and safeguard the accelerated development of China’s digital economy. The Plan is expected to greatly promote industrial users’ DX and the development of digital businesses and provide huge business opportunities for ICT vendors.
Building the Road to Digital China
- Implement new development concepts, accelerate the fostering of new development paradigms, and focus on promoting high-quality development.
- Balance development and security, strengthen systems and worst-case scenario thinking, and enhance the overall layout of the plan.
- Follow the strategic path of solidifying the foundation, empowering the whole system, strengthening capabilities, and optimizing the environment.
- Improve the integrity, systematic approach, and collaboration in the construction of a digital China, and promote the deep integration of the digital economy in the real economy.
- Drive the transformation of ways of production, living, and governance with digitalization to inject strong impetus into the drive of advancing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts with Chinese modernization.
2025 and 2035 Development Goals
The Plan sets out to implement 13 key goals in two phases targeted to be completed by 2025 and 2035, respectively. These goals define the pattern and lay the foundation for the construction of Digital China, and are designed to be more reasonable and coordinated developments across all aspects to strongly support the building of a modern socialist country.
Layout
The construction of Digital China will be laid out according to the framework of “2522”, which provides a directional guide for the development of the economy and society, and makes a clearer plan for the future of China’s digital economy:
Guarantees of Implementation
Efforts must be made to strengthen the overall planning, coordination of progress, and execution of all tasks. Specific guarantee measures will focus on five aspects:
- Strengthening organizational leadership
- Improving institutional mechanisms
- Ensuring investment
- Strengthening talent support
- Creating a good atmosphere.
Moreover, the Plan specifies that efforts must be made in building digital China as a reference for the evaluation of relevant Party and government leading officials, which guarantees the implementation of the Plan from the aspect of KPIs.
The Plan’s Positive Impact on the China ICT Market
- The Plan further highlights the value of digital technologies and strengthens the ICT industry’s development confidence. For the first time, the Plan proposes the promotion of the in-depth integration of digital technology with economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological progress. The Plan will help China promote a stronger digital economy, develop an efficient and coordinated digital government, build a digital culture with confidence and prosperity, create a digital society featuring inclusiveness and convenience, and shape a green and intelligent digital ecological civilization.
- Faster than expected growth in digital infrastructure business opportunities, as well as big data and AI. In November 2022, the China National Development and Reform Commission issued a report on the development of China’s digital economy, which puts forward a plan to moderately deploy digital infrastructure construction in advance to lay a solid foundation for digital economic development. This Plan reaffirms the need to remove the barriers to balanced development of the digital infrastructure across the country and accelerate the construction of infrastructure such as 5G networks, gigabit optical networks, IPv6, mobile Internet of Things (IoT), BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, and national computing network to synergize east and west. The Plan also proposes to promote the big cycle of data resources, accelerate the aggregation and utilization of public data, unleash the potential value of commercial data, speed up the establishment of a system of property rights for data, carry out research on data asset pricing, and establish a mechanism for the participation of data elements in value distribution by contribution.
- Digital sovereignty continues to be refined and deepened, and the cybersecurity market continues to grow rapidly. Digital sovereignty and cybersecurity are becoming increasingly important as the losses caused by geopolitics and insecurity intensify. The Plan sets forth to strengthen cybersecurity and data security and improve the data governance ecosystem and systems. It clearly proposes to improve laws, regulations, and policy systems related to cybersecurity, effectively maintain cybersecurity, enhance data security assurance capabilities, establish a basic system for hierarchical and classified data protection, and perfect the system for network data monitoring and early warning and emergency response with the aim of building a trusted and controllable digital security barrier.
- The Plan promotes international cooperation and opening up to achieve win-win results and benefit the global deployment of Chinese ICT vendors. The Plan specifies to coordinate international cooperation in the digital field by establishing a system of international exchanges and cooperation with multilevel collaboration and support, and multi-entity participation; build a high-quality Digital Silk Road; and actively develop Silk Road ecommerce. China will expand international cooperation in the digital field, actively join digital cooperation platforms under the multilateral frameworks of the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the G20, APEC, BRICS, and the SCO, and build new high-quality new platforms for open cooperation in the digital field.
Learn more about the IDC China Digital Business Strategies research on the impact of government policies on digital business and the ICT market. Talk to IDC experts today.
