Compared to the statement in the 14th Five-Year Plan of “Accelerating Digitalized Development, Building Digital China,” the (new Fourth Plenum) Recommendations propose “Deepening the Advancement of Digital China Construction,” a shift with profound implications. 与“十四五”规划中“加快数字化发展，建设数字中国”的表述相比，《建议》提出“深入推进数字中国建设”，这一转变具有深刻内涵。

Zhang Yixin 张译心, The Construction of Digital China Enters a New Stage of Comprehensive Deepening 数字中国建设步入全面深化新阶段, Chinese Social Sciences Today 中国社会科学报, December 09, 2025, Page A01

The next phase of Digital China is focused on a system-wide reorganization in which data, AI, governance, and industrial integration become mutually reinforcing levers of national modernization. It is less about hardware build-out, and more about managing a deeply digitalized civilization.

On December 9, 2025, China Social Sciences Today published an article titled “The Construction of Digital China Enters a New Stage of Comprehensive Deepening” (数字中国建设步入全面深化新阶段).1 Written by journalist Zhang Yixin (张译心), the piece serves as a useful marker of how China’s think-tank and academic communities now understand the state of Digital China as the 15th Five-Year Plan begins to take shape. In short, they see not merely acceleration, but consolidation, integration, and elevation in strategic intent.

Digital China has moved beyond pilot projects, beyond siloed upgrades, and beyond the foundational phase of informatization as a technological undertaking. It is now positioning itself for complex system integration and nationwide implementation across all sectors. What is being described is nothing less than a re-architecting of China’s economy, society, and governance, and more profoundly, an attempt to define what Chinese scholars increasingly call digital civilization.

As highlighted in the article, three strategic shifts are especially important.

First, the center of gravity is shifting from technology to values. The leadership’s call for “Deepening the Advancement of Digital China Construction” reflects a move from technology-driven implementation to value-driven system design, using digital systems to resolve real-economy bottlenecks, raise productivity, and anchor China’s pursuit of New Quality Productive Forces. In this context, “values” does not mean abstract ethics alone; Chinese scholars explicitly point to Socialist Core Values and traditional Chinese cultural norms as shaping how digital systems should be designed, governed, and deployed.2

Second, the systemic logic of Digital China is hardening into a unified strategic architecture. The article captures a growing consensus: Data Elements → AI Plus → Deep Fusion → Governance form a single, interlocking system not four separate policy or technology lanes. Data supplies AI; AI reshapes industrial and social systems; Deep Fusion converts capability into value; and governance stabilizes the entire structure. This systemic framing remains largely absent from Western commentary, which still tends to isolate technologies rather than analyze architectures.

Third, innovation, especially artificial intelligence, is being elevated to the civilizational level. The Fourth Plenum’s explicit call for AI to “lead a transformation in scientific research paradigms” reflects a belief that AI will become the next dominant industrial system. More importantly, it suggests that the Party intends to design the rules, institutions, and governance frameworks for an emerging digital civilization. This is a conceptual ambition rarely articulated so openly in earlier planning documents.

What also stands out is the article’s cautionary tone. Alongside imagery of robotic arms, cross-provincial data flows, and trillion-token AI consumption, the authors emphasize persistent structural risks: uneven regional capacity, gaps in data and AI governance, external pressure from fragmented global data rules, and the vulnerability of small and medium-sized enterprises during digital transition. This combination of ambition and restraint is increasingly characteristic of Chinese scholarly discourse at this stage.

Taken together, the article offers a clear signal of how the Party-state’s academic establishment now understands the next phase of Digital China: a system-wide reorganization in which data, AI, governance, and industrial integration become mutually reinforcing levers of national modernization.

It is also an early intellectual preview of how Digital China is likely to be framed in the 15th Five-Year Plan itself. Less about hardware build-out, and more about managing a deeply digitalized civilization.

Continue reading for a lightly edited Google Translate machine translation of Construction of Digital China Enters a New Stage of Comprehensive Deepening →

Footnotes

  1. Update: On December 19, 2025, Chinese Social Sciences Today published a condensed English-language version of Zhang Yixin’s article titled “‘Digital China’ ushers in new stage.” ↩︎
  2. In discussing value-driven leadership over digitalized transformation, Chinese experts point to both Socialist Core Values and traditional Chinese culture as the main drivers. ↩︎