Last revised on December 1, 2025: See Whole-of-City (All Domain) Digital Transformation

The report of the 19th National Party Congress stated that “the principal contradiction in our society has transformed into the contradiction between the people’s ever-growing need for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development.” This shift in contradictions is a change of global and historical significance, posing new demands on many aspects of our Party and country. Developing Digital China is about responding to these new changes and new demands, using digitalized means to resolve and address social contradictions. Against this backdrop, the central government explicitly put forward the new concept of building a “Smart Society” in the report. 党的十九大报告提出“我们社会的主要矛盾已经转化为人民日益增长的对美好生活的需要和不平衡不充分的发展之间的矛盾”。这个矛盾变化是带有全局性、历史性的变化，对我们党和国家的许多方面都提出了新的要求。发展数字中国，就是要应对新变化、新要求，通过数字化手段来解决和处理社会矛盾，所以在这样的背景下，中央在报告中明确提出建设“智慧社会”的新理念。

“The Mission of Digital China: Building a Smart Society 数字中国的使命——打造智慧社会,” Informatization of China Construction 中国建设信息化, August 29, 2018.

Smart Society (智慧社会) is the least understood, and arguably the most important, component of China’s elite digital triad. While outside observers often focus on AI competition, chip controls, or headline technologies, Beijing has been quietly building something far more ambitious: a fully digitalized, intelligentized social system that fuses data, governance, industry, and everyday life. In the Party’s view, the digital age will be won or lost not in laboratories or factories, but in cities and ultimately in the emergence of Smart Society as a lived reality.

The digital age will be won through systems, not just new things

The Party’s national digital project rests on a simple proposition: the digital age will be won through system-level achievement, not merely through the accumulation of 5G, AI, robots, or any other individual technology. Smart Society is the Party’s attempt to build a genuinely functioning digital civilization, one structured, managed, and coordinated through a unified data architecture, precision governance models, and deeply fused industry–city ecosystems.

The concept first emerged nearly a decade ago as a Sinicized upgrade to the global “Smart City” idea. But it has since expanded dramatically, evolving into a comprehensive framework for digitally transforming the entire Five-Sphere Integrated Plan: economy, government, society, culture, and ecology.

In Party theory, a fully intelligentized Smart Society is what comes after a fully informatized Digital China. It represents the end-state toward which Digital China points: a synchronized, data-driven societal system designed to deliver China’s model of digitalized socialist modernization.

Whole-of-City (All Domain) Digitalized Transformation

Central to the evolution of Smart Society is a new term now reshaping national policy: Whole-of-City (All Domain) Digitalized Transformation (城市全域数字化转型). This marks a decisive shift from fragmented pilots to system-level transformation. Cities are no longer simply places where digital tools are applied; they are becoming digital organisms whose “blood vessels” and “nervous system” are powered by data.

The Party now views cities as the comprehensive carriers of Digital China: a bridge between today’s informatized systems and tomorrow’s intelligentized Smart Society.

A digitalized model of socialist modernization

Understanding Smart Society therefore means understanding what China is trying to build: a digitalized model of socialist modernization designed to be coherent, scalable, and ultimately exemplary. Shanghai’s “One Network,” Hangzhou’s “City Brain,” and Xiong’an’s “Digital Twin City” are not isolated experiments, they are prototypes of the societal architecture Beijing intends to replicate nationwide. In the Party’s view, global competition will be determined not only by who possesses the most advanced technologies, but by who can build a digital societal model that actually works, at scale.

This guide brings together curated translations, official documents, commentaries, and analytical pieces to help readers navigate this emerging concept. The goal is simple: to provide a clear starting point. Smart Society is vast, evolving rapidly, and still poorly understood outside China. Yet it sits at the center of the Party’s elite digital triad, and is essential to understanding how Beijing imagines the future it is building.

This guide to Smart Society remains a work in progress. But check back later. I have much to add, as time permits.🤞

What is Whole-of-City (All Domain) Digital Transformation?