Compared to the statement in the 14th Five-Year Plan of “Accelerating Digitalized Development, Building Digital China,” the (new Fourth Plenum) Recommendations propose “Deeply Advancing the Construction of Digital China,” a shift with profound implications. 与“十四五”规划中“加快数字化发展，建设数字中国”的表述相比，《建议》提出“深入推进数字中国建设”，这一转变具有深刻内涵。
Zhang Yixin 张译心, The Construction of Digital China Enters a New Stage of Comprehensive Deepening 数字中国建设步入全面深化新阶段, Chinese Social Sciences Today 中国社会科学报, December 09, 2025, Page A01
The next phase of Digital China is focused on a system-wide reorganization in which data, AI, governance, and industrial integration become mutually reinforcing levers of national modernization. It is less about hardware build-out than about governing a deeply digitalized civilization.
On December 9, 2025, Chinese Social Sciences Today published journalist Zhang Yixin’s article, “The Construction of Digital China Enters a New Stage of Comprehensive Deepening” (数字中国建设步入全面深化新阶段).1 The essay is a useful marker of how China’s think-tank and academic communities now understand the state of Digital China as the 15th Five-Year Plan begins to take shape. In short, they see not merely acceleration, but consolidation, integration, and elevation in strategic intent.
Digital China has moved beyond pilot projects, siloed upgrades, and the foundational phase of informatization as a technological undertaking. It is now being positioned for complex system integration and nationwide implementation across all sectors. What is being described is not only a technological revolution, but a systemic transformation bearing on national governance, economic development, social civilization, and what Chinese scholars increasingly call digital civilization.
Zhang Yixin’s essay highlights three strategic shifts that are especially important for understanding this next phase of Digital China.
First, Digital China is shifting from technology deployment to the construction of digital civilization.
This does not mean that technology is becoming less important. It means that technology is being placed inside a larger political, economic, social, and cultural project. The leadership’s call for “Deeply Advancing the Construction of Digital China” reflects a move beyond technology-driven implementation toward the construction of a fully digitalized society.
In this context, “digital civilization” refers to more than digital infrastructure, online services, or industrial upgrades. It describes the Party-state’s effort to organize economic life, social governance, cultural values, and national modernization around deeply embedded digital systems. Chinese scholars explicitly point to Socialist Core Values and traditional Chinese cultural norms as shaping how digital systems should be designed, governed, and deployed.2
Second, the systemic logic of Digital China is consolidating into a unified strategic architecture.
The article captures a growing consensus: Data Factors, AI Plus, Deep Fusion, and Governance are not four separate policy or technology lanes. They form a single, interlocking system. Data supplies AI; AI reshapes industrial and social systems; Deep Fusion converts capability into value; and governance stabilizes the entire structure. This systemic framing remains largely absent from Western commentary, which still tends to isolate technologies rather than analyze architectures.
Third, innovation, especially artificial intelligence, is being elevated to the civilizational level.
The Fourth Plenum’s explicit call for AI to “lead a transformation in scientific research paradigms” reflects a belief that AI will become the next dominant industrial system. More importantly, it suggests that the Party intends to design the rules, institutions, and governance frameworks for an emerging digital civilization. This is a conceptual ambition rarely articulated so openly in earlier planning documents.
Cautionary Tone but Clear Signal
What also stands out is the article’s cautionary tone. Alongside imagery of robotic arms, cross-provincial data flows, and trillion-token AI consumption, Zhang emphasizes persistent structural risks: uneven regional capacity, gaps in data and AI governance, external pressure from fragmented global data rules, and the vulnerability of small and medium-sized enterprises during digital transition. This combination of ambition and restraint is increasingly characteristic of Chinese scholarly discourse at this stage.
Taken together, the article offers a clear signal of how the Party-state’s academic establishment now understands the next phase of Digital China: a system-wide reorganization in which data, AI, governance, and industrial integration become mutually reinforcing levers of national modernization. It is also an early intellectual preview of how Digital China is likely to be framed in the 15th Five-Year Plan itself: less as a hardware build-out, and more as the governance of a deeply digitalized civilization.
Footnotes
- Update: On December 19, 2025, Chinese Social Sciences Today published a condensed English-language version of Zhang Yixin’s article titled “‘Digital China’ ushers in new stage.” ↩︎
- In discussing value-driven leadership in digitalized transformation, Chinese experts point to both Socialist Core Values and traditional Chinese culture as key drivers. ↩︎