The Problem: China’s national digital strategy remains a critical U.S. blind spot.
June 2021: I rebuilt this website to warn that China’s three top-level, interconnected digital strategies — Digital China, Cyber Great Power, and Smart Society — were largely absent from Western discourse, despite their central place in Chinese Communist Party strategic planning.
June 2026: Five years later, the blind spot remains. The Digital Triad still has not entered the Western strategic conversation. Meanwhile, the analytical gap has widened, clouding Western understanding of adjacent national strategies such as Military-Civil Fusion and cross-cutting digital-intelligent initiatives such as Artificial Intelligence Plus.
Today: I continue watching for signs that the gap is closing. Yet most Western experts still describe only parts of China’s digital transformation without recognizing Digital China as the overarching strategy that connects those parts and drives the whole.
What we miss: In an era of intensifying geostrategic competition, these formally named, publicly available strategies offer unmatched insight into Beijing’s techno-ideological vision for the digital age, the competitive ambitions driving it, and the constrained timeline shaping its implementation.
My goal: This website exists to bring these strategies into the public and policy conversation; clarify the seriousness, scope, and speed of their implementation; assess the risks they may carry; and support informed dialogue with allies and partners on constructive responses.
Rotating Explainers
Latest Posts
- Military-Civil Fusion and the Industrial Internet: A Reference Guide
- China’s Military-Civil Fusion Is Changing Form, Part 5/5: Where Strategy Becomes Infrastructure
- China’s Military-Civil Fusion Is Changing Form, Part 4/5: The Industrial Internet as Dual-Use Ecosystem
- China’s Military-Civil Fusion Is Changing Form, Part 3/5: The Industrial Internet as Defense Industry Platform
- China’s Military-Civil Fusion Is Changing Form, Part 2/5: The Industrial Internet Hidden in Plain Sight
This is an independent educational website managed by David Dorman. I receive no outside funding and charge no fees for its content. The website provides analysis of China’s three elite digital strategies—Digital China, Cyber Great Power, and Smart Society—for educational, research, and scholarly purposes. I am solely responsible for all content. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any past employers. No institutional endorsement should be inferred.