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.
Cyberspace Administration of China, 2021 Digital China Development Report, July 23, 2022
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 major digital strategies 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).
Although these concepts appeared within a few years of one another, they did not originate as a single, unified design. Each emerged from a different problem set and political context. Cyber Great Power grew out of top-level Party discourse on internet sovereignty, security, and national strength. Digital China evolved from Xi’s earlier provincial experimentation in Fujian and Zhejiang before maturing into a national framework. Smart Society, by contrast, originated outside China and was later absorbed, redefined, and ideologically repurposed by the Party.
In their early years, these strategies developed largely in parallel. What unified them was not institutional design, but intent: each sought to harness the transformative potential of digital technology in service of Party rule and socialist modernization.
It took nearly a decade, and a convergence of powerful internal and external pressures, for Beijing to integrate the three strategies into a coherent system. The COVID-19 pandemic elevated the importance of digital governance and data-driven control, while intensifying strategic competition with the United States sharpened the imperative to synchronize technology, security, and development. Together, these pressures created what the Party described as a new “strategic opportunity,” accelerating theoretical fusion across the digital domain.
When Xi Jinping publicly linked the three strategies at the 19th Party Congress in 2017, he offered little explanation. Clarification came later through Party commentaries and cadre education campaigns, which described the trio as an integrated set of strategic plans (战略部署) guiding China’s path toward socialist modernization in the digital age.
Critically, this integration should not be understood as a hierarchy. While official pedagogy sometimes presents the strategies in sequence, their real significance lies in mutual dependence. Cyber Great Power provides the security and sovereignty conditions for Digital China. Digital China supplies the data, infrastructure, and systems required to build Smart Society. Smart Society, in turn, operationalizes both through digitally enabled governance and social management. None can function fully without the others.
By the conclusion of China’s national legislative sessions in March 2021, this interdependence was fully codified. The three strategies had become a single strategic architecture: one in which security, development, and governance are digitally fused to support China’s rise as a Modernized Socialist Great Power.
Understanding this dependency is essential. Treating the triad as hierarchical obscures how Beijing actually organizes power in the digital age. The system works not because one strategy sits above the others, but because all three are designed to operate together.
Continue reading an expanded version of this essay with footnotes: David Dorman and John Hemmings, Digital China: The Strategy and Its Geopolitical Implications, Issues and Insights, February 20, 2023.
| 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. |