Spatial Design - Digital China Wins the Future

Category: Spatial Design

2 Posts

Two Chinese scientists programming a large urban "brain" computer system.

Analysis, Smart Society, Spatial Design

Digital China’s Next Stage Will Be Won or Lost in Smart Cities

December 1, 2025

Smart Society, Spatial Design, Strategy Milestone

Strategy Milestone: Whole-of-City Digitalized Transformation Defined as Path to Smart Society

January 10, 2025

Key One: China has an elite digital triad of national strategies: Cyber Great Power, Digital China, and Smart Society. Together, they drive the country's digital-intelligent transformation into a Modernized Socialist Great Power. Although this website focuses on Digital China, understanding its full scope requires knowing all three.

Key Two: Digital China is both a strategy and a stack. The strategy—an ends, ways, and means framework—explains how the Party generates and employs digital power. The stack—a layered system architecture—shows how that power is built. Together, they provide an integrated model for understanding China’s national digital strategy.

“The struggle between China and the United States in cyberspace is intensifying. The U.S. policy of containment against China has expanded from physical space to cyberspace, aiming to place China in a passive position. Cyber warfare is no longer a matter of whether we want to fight it or not; it has reached a point where we have no choice but to respond."
Zheng Bijian, Face the Challenge with Comprehensive Planning; Strive to Build a World Class Cyber Great Power in Ten Years, State Council Secretariat Second Bureau, April 3, 2013

“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.”
“The Mission of Digital China: Building a Smart Society,” Informatization of China Construction, August 29, 2018