As a new generation of intelligent comprehensive digital information infrastructure, 6G will break through the traditional scope of mobile communication, achieving deep fusion of communications with intelligence, sensing, computing, and security.

6G作为新一代智能化综合性数字信息基础设施，将突破传统移动通信范畴，实现通信与智能、感知、计算、安全等深度融合。

Zhang Yunming, Vice Minister, Minister of Industry and Information Technology at the 2025 6G Development Conference in Beijing, November 13, 2025.

China’s 6G strategy is moving from concept to implementation. As 2025 closes, Beijing is presenting 6G not simply as the next generation of mobile communications, but as a new layer of intelligent digital infrastructure designed to support AI-native networks, intelligent terminals, and the long-term construction of Digital China.

Much of the most recent public information on China’s 6G program emerged from the 2025 6G Development Conference, held in Beijing on November 13. This post provides a brief analytical summary of that material, with sources listed below.

Three major themes repeat across PRC media reporting, in both Chinese and English. These are not the only themes, but their consistency across official and semi-official reporting suggests they reflect the preferred policy framing. The important point is not that China is already deploying 6G. It is that Beijing is now defining what 6G is supposed to become: the network layer for AI-native industrial, urban, and social systems.

6G is now a national-level R&D program entering its second phase

China has completed its first phase of 6G key-technology trials, which ran from 2022 to 2024, and has now moved into a second phase focused on technical solution testing and prototype development from 2025 to 2026. This is not being framed as a narrow laboratory experiment. It is presented as a centrally coordinated, industry-wide engineering effort.

The roadmap is explicit:

Phase 1, 2022–2024: identify key 6G technologies.

Phase 2, 2025–2026: conduct technical solution trials and develop 6G prototypes.

Phase 3, 2027–2030: complete 6G system verification and move toward pre-commercial equipment.

This sequencing mirrors the methodical buildout of 5G, but with broader industrial participation, deeper integration with AI, and stronger international standardization ambitions.

6G is framed as an evolution of 5G, not a rupture

One noteworthy point repeated across the reporting is that PRC officials stress that 6G must “stand on the shoulders of 5G.” This emphasis aligns with Digital China’s long-running principle of “thickening” the digital foundation rather than “chasing” speculative frontier technologies.

The GSMA’s “two-step” framing — first fully unlock 5G’s potential, then advance naturally to 6G — is quoted approvingly. The PRC message mirrors this logic: 5G is not finished, and 6G is not a replacement for 5G so much as the next stage in its evolution.

The political meaning is clear. Digital China is cumulative, iterative, and strategically sequenced. Each layer of of New Type Infrastructure — networks, computing power, data, and AI — is intended to reinforce the others. That cumulative logic has been central to New Type Infrastructure since it was formally defined in 2020.

The real frontier is 6G, AI, and intelligent terminals

Perhaps the most strategically revealing reports concern AI terminals (AI终端). PRC reporting argues that 5G’s promise was constrained less by network capability than by the stagnation of terminal innovation. In this framing, 6G is positioned as the enabling network architecture for an AI-native device ecosystem.

That ecosystem includes AI phones, AI PCs, AR/VR intelligent devices, embodied intelligent robots, low-altitude drones, and intelligent connected vehicles. The point is not merely that these devices will connect to faster networks. It is that 6G is being imagined as the infrastructure layer for intelligent terminals that sense, compute, communicate, and act within a larger data-driven system.

Taken together, PRC experts are framing 6G as the network architecture of the intelligent agent era (智能体时代). That framing aligns directly with Digital China’s long-term technological horizon: a society of ubiquitous, interoperable, intelligent terminals embedded in a unified, data-driven national digital infrastructure.

Sources