As China’s 15th Five-Year Plan begins to take shape, Digital China is increasingly appearing in two places at once: as a domestic engine of industrial upgrading and as part of the broader international expansion of Chinese firms, capital, infrastructure, and standards.
That dual logic came into view at the CITIC Securities 2026 Capital Market Annual Conference, held in Shenzhen on November 11, 2025. Two reports from the same event presented two different stories. One focused on Digital China as a top-tier national strategy for China’s domestic industrial development. The other focused on the accelerating globalization of Chinese enterprises. Read together, they point toward the same larger shift: Digital China remains deeply rooted in China’s internal modernization project, but the environment in which it now operates is increasingly global.
Over the past two years, I have written repeatedly about the quiet but profound evolution of Digital China from a domestic modernization program into a strategy built around two operating environments: China’s internal digitalized transformation and an increasingly assertive external digital posture. The Party formalized this shift in early 2023, when the Plan for the Global Layout of Digital China Construction first added the “international environment” (国际环境) alongside the domestic environment as a core component of the strategy.
As the 20th Central Committee 4th Plenum concluded and its recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan began to crystallize, these two tracks are becoming easier to see. They are not always linked explicitly in official or media narratives. But they are increasingly advancing in parallel.
In the first report by Cailianpress, CITIC Securities’ chief macro and policy analyst Yang Fan (杨帆) identifies three top-tier national strategies expected to anchor China’s industrial development during the 15th FYP period: Digital China (数字中国), Aerospace Great Power (航天强国), and Energy Great Power (能源强国). Her remarks focused entirely on the domestic industrial dimension. She connects Digital China to the Plenum’s call to maintain a “reasonable share of manufacturing” (制造业合理比重) and to end destructive “involution” (反内卷) in industry, both of which are intended to support the accelerated construction of a modernized industrial system (现代化产业体系).
For Yang, AI’s empowerment of the “full industrial chain” (全产业链) is now a “high-certainty direction” (高度确定方向). Growth is expected to come from applications, but it remains grounded in hard infrastructure: satellite constellations entering a dense launch phase, new type energy storage under the national “doubling plan” (倍增计划), and power sector reforms that reshape pricing and capacity compensation. This is Digital China, alongside aerospace and energy, as a domestic engine of industrial upgrading. Yang makes no specific reference to globalization or overseas expansion.
A second report from the same conference, this one in China Daily Hong Kong, highlights a different but equally important trend: the accelerating globalization of Chinese enterprises. Yang Fan was again quoted, this time emphasizing a strategic shift from passive tariff evasion to proactive overseas expansion, especially across the Global South. The article notes that despite tariff turbulence, China’s manufacturing exports grew 7.1 percent in the first three quarters, and Chinese firms’ revenue from overseas markets now approaches 17 percent, with expectations of surpassing 20 percent by 2028. Outward FDI reached $192.2 billion in 2024, nearly 12 percent of global flows, keeping China among the top three global investors for the thirteenth straight year. Former IMF deputy managing director Zhu Min argued that this large-scale, high-quality push is actively reshaping global trade and capital flows.
Although the China Daily report does not mention Digital China, the state-driven acceleration of Chinese digital enterprises “going global” has been a near-constant theme in domestic coverage for the past several years. Where the two reports converge is in the strategic framework laid out by the Party itself. The 2023 Plan for the Global Layout of Digital China Construction explicitly expanded the strategy’s scope to include both the domestic environment and the international environment. Yang Fan’s domestic industrial framing fits cleanly into the former, while China Daily’s account of outward investment and multinational expansion fits equally cleanly into the latter.
Taken together, these two reports form a picture that closely mirrors the Party’s intended direction, even though neither article explicitly makes the connection. As China enters the 15th Five-Year Plan period, Digital China’s domestic engine is accelerating through AI-enabled industrial upgrading, modern industrial system construction, and national New Type Infrastructure build-out. At the same time, Chinese firms and capital are moving outward at scale, especially into the Global South, carrying Chinese technology, standards, platforms, and industrial capacity into new markets.
That is the larger significance. Digital China is not becoming less domestic. Its internal modernization function remains central. But globalization is now part of its operating environment. The two tracks, digitalized modernization at home and economic expansion abroad, are advancing simultaneously. Together, they point toward Digital China’s next phase: a strategy built at home, but increasingly operating in the world.