In 2017, the 19th Party Congress report clearly proposed to build “Cyber Great Power, Digital China, and Smart Society,” and Digital China was written into Party and state programmatic documents for the first time.
2017年，党的十九大报告明确提出建设“网络强国、数字中国、智慧社会”，数字中国首次写入党和国家纲领性文件。
Cyberspace Administration of China, 2021 Digital China Development Report, July 23, 2022
Executive Summary
Cyber Great Power, Digital China, and Smart Society are three distinct, high-level Chinese national digital strategies. They are not organized in a formal hierarchy, but their development and success are fundamentally dependent. Cyber Great Power establishes the security, sovereignty, and network foundations necessary for Digital China. Digital China, in turn, provides the infrastructure, data systems, and digital capabilities required to realize Smart Society. These dependencies are asymmetric, even as the underlying ways and means of implementing the strategies increasingly reinforce one another. This analysis examines their different origins, their convergence in Party strategic planning, and the distinction between foundational dependence and mutual support. Understanding that relationship is essential to understanding China’s larger digital transformation.
Three Strategies, Different Origins
Xi’s twenty-year vision for Digital China, strengthened by China’s emerging Cyber Great Power status, and joined in a shared drive to create a Smart Society, forms the strategic architecture guiding China’s ascent as a Modernized Socialist Great Power in the digital age.
As China’s informatization path entered what the Party now calls the stage of “intelligentization” under Xi Jinping, three national digital strategies — the “Digital Triad”1 — emerged to clarify leadership intent, policy direction, and ideological purpose. These were Cyber Great Power (网络强国), Digital China (数字中国), and Smart Society (智慧社会).
The three strategies did not originate as a single, unified design. Cyber Great Power grew from Party thinking on cyber sovereignty, network security, and national power. Digital China evolved from Xi’s Digital Fujian initiative and subsequent experience with provincial informatization before becoming a national strategy. Smart Society emerged within a broader international discussion of intelligent technologies, smart cities, and digitally enabled social development, but acquired a distinctive purpose in the Party’s conception of socialist modernization and social governance.
Their origins and functions differ, but their strategic objectives increasingly converged. Each addresses a different dimension of the transformation that Beijing seeks to achieve through informatization, digitalization, and intelligentization.
Dependent, Not Hierarchical
The relationship among the three strategies is best understood as one of foundational dependence, not strategic hierarchy.
Cyber Great Power establishes the security, sovereignty, and network conditions necessary for Digital China. Digital China, in turn, develops the infrastructure, data systems, and digital capabilities required to realize Smart Society. The dependencies are asymmetric: Digital China cannot fully succeed without the foundations established through Cyber Great Power, and Smart Society cannot be realized without the capabilities developed through Digital China. Cyber Great Power, however, has strategic objectives that do not depend on the prior realization of either of the other two.
Dependence does not preclude mutual support. The underlying ways and means of implementing these strategies can reinforce one another. Digital China’s infrastructure and technological capabilities also strengthen Cyber Great Power, for example, while the requirements of Smart Society help shape Digital China’s continued development. These supporting relationships do not eliminate the foundational dependencies. They explain how three distinct, high-level strategic plans can develop together without occupying different levels in a formal hierarchy.
The distinction matters. The order in which capabilities must be established is not necessarily the order of political authority or strategic importance. The three strategies are equal in their high-level standing, but they perform different functions and face different conditions for success.
From Separate Strategies to Coordinated Planning
Although the three strategies emerged from different historical and institutional contexts, their convergence was already evident in the 19th Party Congress in 2017. Xi Jinping explicitly reaffirmed their relationship in his April 2018 congratulatory letter to the first Digital China Summit, stating that the Party Congress had established strategic plans (战略部署) for building Cyber Great Power, Digital China, and Smart Society.
That recognition was an important step, but it did not mean that the three strategies had become a single, fully integrated program. Their different origins, institutional responsibilities, and development requirements continued to shape implementation. Subsequent Party commentaries and national planning documents helped clarify their relationships and the contributions each could make to socialist modernization.
The COVID-19 pandemic and intensifying strategic competition with the United States added urgency to digital governance, security, and technological development. These pressures accelerated the importance of coordination, but the strategic connection among the three had been established earlier.
Why the Distinction Matters
By 2021, Party discourse and national planning increasingly reflected the interconnected roles of Cyber Great Power, Digital China, and Smart Society. Their relationship was becoming clearer, even as the three continued to pursue different strategic objectives and develop at different rates.
Understanding their foundational dependencies is essential. Treating the Digital Triad as a hierarchy confuses enabling relationships with political authority. Treating the three strategies as entirely independent obscures the conditions necessary for their success. And treating mutual support among their ways and means as evidence of equal dependence overlooks an important asymmetry in their strategic development.
The Digital Triad is best understood as three distinct, high-level strategic plans whose dependencies help explain how China intends to build digital power, transform governance and society, and advance socialist modernization.
The Three Strategic Plans at a Glance
| Cyber Great Power (网络强国) | Top-level design, national strategy, and end state to become a “world class” (世界一流) great power in the cyber domain. Seeks to build a uniform, nationally-integrated framework of cybersecurity and informatization systems (rules, institutions, and technology) with global reach and impact. Cyber Great Power can be achieved independent of Digital China and/or Smart Society. |
| Digital China (数字中国) | Top level design, “overall” strategy, and end state for national “informatization.” Seeks digital transformation at the societal level (economy, government, society, culture, and environment) to enhance “core competitiveness,” create a “Smart Society,” and ensure regime stability in support of building a Modernized Socialist Great Power. Digital China’s success is dependent on the success of Cyber Great Power. |
| Smart Society (智慧社会) | End state for national “intelligentization,” top level design of “New Type Smart Cities,” and the foundation for a new global model of socialist development. Seeks modernized social governance, elimination of the digital divide, the widest development of science and technology talent, and improvements to the “people’s livelihood” through government efficiency and social equity. Smart Society’s success is dependent on the success of Digital China. |
Footnote
- I coined the term “digital triad” for conceptual clarity and ease of writing; it is not used in China. Similarly, however, some Chinese writers have grouped these three strategies as the “three propositions” (sange mingti, 三个命题) for convenience, although the phrase appears to lack Party sanction. ↩︎
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