Last Revised on November 13, 2025: See updated Digital Economy section

From Digital Fujian to Digital China, General Secretary Xi Jinping’s strategic thinking on building an informatized China has been consistent, in one continuous line, and highly connected to thought and theory. 从数字福建到数字中国，习近平总书记建设信息化中国的战略思想一以贯之，一脉相承，在思想上、理念上高度关联。

“Digital Fujian is the Ideological Source of Digital China (数字福建是数字中国的思想源头),” Guangming Daily, Page One, April 23, 2018, written by a Guangming Daily commentator (本报评论员).

China has a national digital strategy. It is called Digital China.

Western analysts often treat China’s digital policies as a patchwork of regulations, surveillance tools, and technology ambitions. What many overlook is the overarching strategy that ties it all together: Digital China.

This misunderstanding does not arise because the strategy is hidden. On the contrary, Digital China features prominently in Chinese Communist Party plans, speeches, and programmatic documents. But because the strategy differs so sharply from Western approaches to digital development, it is often misread, or ignored entirely. The result is that we miss the full picture of what the Party intends to achieve.

Intriguingly, many Western experts describe Digital China’s goals and mechanisms in detail yet never mention the strategy by name, suggesting that analysts often examine the phenomenon without recognizing the strategic framework that defines and drives it. Without that overarching context, intent is easily misread and analysis often becomes fragmented or inaccurate.

That’s a mistake. Context matters.

Digital China is the Party’s strategic blueprint to digitally transform the entire nation. It is not simply about 5G, AI, robots, or semiconductors. Nor it is just about competing technologically with the United States. It is about using these technologies holistically and systemically to rebuild China’s economy, society, government, culture, ecology, and even ideology on a digital foundation.

The goal? To digitally transform China’s path to National Rejuvenation and to promote a new globally competitive model of socialist modernization.

By mobilizing all elements of national power to develop and integrate digital technologies across every sphere of governance and development, Digital China functions as a grand strategy, arguably the world’s first digital grand strategy.

If this is your first encounter with Digital China, the short explainers below offer a quick primer. They introduce the strategy’s framework and goals, its historical evolution, and the political theory that underlies it.

What is Digital China?

Can Digital China be described using an “Ends, Ways, and Means” Strategic Framework?

Digital China’s Strategic Framework: Ends, Ways, and Means

Digital China has evolved through a continuous process of designing, implementing, evaluating, revising, and integrating countless Party decisions, objectives, missions, plans, projects, and priority areas of action over months, years, and now decades.

Who leads Digital China?

Does Digital China have an International Dimension?

Does Digital China support Military-Civil Fusion?

How can the Digital China strategy be Ideological, Global, and Grand all at once?

What is the U.S. approach to Digital China?

Get The Word Out: “Digital China” Isn’t Just a Meme

We never hear U.S. companies say they want to help China become a Cyber Great Power or a Maritime Great Power. Digital China falls into the same class of the Party’s strategic plans, but because the term sounds vague or benign in English, it is often treated casually.

What is the Role of Data in Digital China?

Has PRC Media reported on Digital China accurately?

The Digital China “Plan” is New, but “Digital China” is Not

The Digital China Plan has been described as an ‘unveiling’ and as a ‘blueprint.’ Digital China is a blueprint. But it is Xi Jinping’s blueprint for digital transformation of socialist modernization, and it is certainly not new.

What is Digital Government?

What is Digital Economy?

Digital Gulf of Tonkin Plan: Expanding the China-ASEAN Digital Economy

The New Digital Gulf of Tonkin Construction Plan is designed to rationalize, scale, and extend New Type Infrastructure across China’s southwest and along its maritime frontier with ASEAN. Far more than a regional development initiative, it represents a strategic extension of Digital China into the maritime domain.

A word on the translation of Digital China.

“Digital China,” not “digital China”

Digital China is the title of China’s national digital strategy and by standard writing convention is capitalized. The routine mistranslation of this title as “digital China” or “digital nation” masks its strategic significance, regardless of intent.