Building and operating National Data Infrastructure is a key move for further strengthening the foundations of Digital China’s development. In practice, this requires carefully coordinating several important relationships, including top-level design and practical experimentation, high-quality supply and diverse scenario-based demand, technological development and infrastructure construction, and infrastructure deployment and operational optimization, in order to advance the construction of Digital China while improving its quality and effectiveness. 建设和运营国家数据基础设施是进一步夯实数字中国发展基础的关键落子。在实践中，需要统筹好顶层设计与实践探索、高质量供给与多场景需求、技术发展与基础设施建设、建设布局与运营优化等重要关系，推动数字中国建设稳中提质。
Liu Liehong (刘烈宏), “Using Advanced Data Infrastructure to Support the Construction of Digital China” (以高水平数据基础设施助力数字中国建设), Qiushi, March 01, 2026
In a recent article in Qiushi, the Party’s flagship theoretical journal, National Data Administration Director Liu Liehong explains why the 15th Five-Year Plan prioritizes the construction of National Data Infrastructure as a core pillar of the Digital China strategy. The article offers a rare, authoritative window into Beijing’s thinking on data infrastructure, national competitiveness, and the next phase of digital transformation.
Data is no longer treated by Beijing as a byproduct of digital activity. It is now understood as a strategic factor of production: a resource that must be organized, circulated, governed, and converted into economic and technological power. In Liu’s framing, National Data Infrastructure is the system designed to make that conversion possible.
Its purpose is not simply to store or transmit data, but to create a trusted national architecture for data collection, aggregation, transmission, processing, circulation, utilization, operation, and security. In this sense, China is not only building data centers or digital platforms. It is attempting to construct the institutional and technological infrastructure required to mobilize data at national scale.
This marks an important shift in Beijing’s strategic thinking. The digital future, in this view, will not be decided only by advances in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, telecommunications, or platform companies. It will also be shaped by the systems capable of integrating data resources, computing power, standards, markets, and governance.
Liu’s essay offers an unusually direct statement of Beijing’s ambition: National Data Infrastructure is being built as a foundational layer of Digital China and a strategic tool for strengthening China’s position in the emerging global data order.
Five Strategic Signals in Liu Liehong’s Article
Liu’s article sends five strategic signals.
First, China has elevated data into a core strategic resource of the digital era. Data is treated not merely as information, but as a production factor capable of shaping innovation, productivity, and national competitiveness.
Second, National Data Infrastructure has become a new category of national infrastructure. In Liu’s framing, it belongs alongside the major infrastructure systems that structure economic development.
Third, Beijing is constructing a national system for data circulation. The goal is to overcome fragmented standards, disconnected systems, and “data islands” by creating trusted channels through which data can move across regions, industries, departments, and platforms.
Fourth, data infrastructure is being integrated with computing power infrastructure. Data provides the resource base; computing power turns that resource into usable intelligence. Together, they form interdependent layers of China’s emerging national digital architecture. Seen through the Digital China stack, Liu’s article helps clarify how Beijing is linking data and compute as foundational layers of a larger system.
Fifth, the objective extends beyond infrastructure itself. Liu’s argument points toward the application of data-driven systems across the economy, government, industry, and society. This is where National Data Infrastructure connects directly to Digital China and the longer-term construction of Smart Society.
Data as the Strategic Resource of the Digital Age
One of the most important elements of Liu’s article is its explicit framing of data as a strategic resource of the digital era. In China’s policy language, data is no longer treated simply as information generated by digital activity. It is treated as a new factor of production, alongside land, labor, capital, and technology.
This matters because data behaves differently from traditional resources. It can be copied, combined, reused, and applied across sectors. When organized and circulated effectively, it can support industrial upgrading, artificial intelligence, scientific research, platform development, and governance modernization. Its value increases not only through possession, but through connection, integration, and use.
That is why data infrastructure has become strategically important. For Beijing, the central challenge is not merely to accumulate more data, but to make data usable at scale while keeping it secure, compliant, and governable. Liu frames National Data Infrastructure as the system designed to solve this problem: a trusted architecture for turning dispersed data resources into a usable production factor.
In this sense, data policy has moved beyond the technical domain. It now sits at the center of China’s development strategy. The ability to organize, circulate, and govern national data resources is increasingly viewed as a source of technological leadership, economic productivity, and national power.
National Data Infrastructure as a New Category of National Infrastructure
Liu’s article also elevates data infrastructure to the level of national infrastructure. Historically, major phases of development have been shaped by large-scale infrastructure systems. Railways enabled industrial expansion, electricity networks powered modern manufacturing, and telecommunications networks supported the information age.
In Liu’s framing, data infrastructure represents the next stage in this progression. It is treated as a category of New Type Infrastructure designed to support the collection, aggregation, transmission, processing, circulation, utilization, operation, and security of data across the economy.
This is an important conceptual shift. Data infrastructure is not simply a technical layer beneath the digital economy. It is the operating environment through which data becomes usable as a production factor. By connecting hardware, software, model algorithms, standards, institutional mechanisms, and security systems, China is attempting to build a national architecture for data circulation and value creation.
The strategic significance is clear. Just as earlier infrastructure systems shaped the industrial and information eras, Beijing now views data infrastructure as one of the foundational systems that will shape digital-era competitiveness.
Building a National Data Circulation System
A central theme in Liu’s article is that data has value only when it can circulate. Accumulating data is not enough. If data remains trapped inside departments, platforms, regions, or enterprises, it cannot function as a production factor at national scale.
This is why Liu places so much emphasis on overcoming “data islands.” China’s data resources remain fragmented across disconnected systems, uneven technical standards, and institutional barriers. These divisions limit the ability of firms, local governments, industries, and researchers to combine data in ways that generate economic and technological value.
National Data Infrastructure is intended to solve this problem by creating a trusted circulation environment. Liu emphasizes the need for systems that allow data to move securely, efficiently, and in compliance with governance requirements. The goal is not unrestricted data flow, but regulated circulation: data should be findable, usable, traceable, and protected as it moves across different actors and application scenarios.
This trusted circulation system is also central to China’s effort to build a National Unified Data Market. For data to become a functioning production factor, it must be discoverable, priced, exchanged, governed, and applied through more standardized rules and interoperable infrastructure. Data exchanges, common standards, trusted data spaces, privacy-preserving computing, blockchain traceability, and related technical systems all serve this larger objective.
In this sense, Liu’s argument is both technical and institutional. Beijing is trying to transform scattered data resources into a governed national circulation system. The objective is to move from isolated data holdings toward a more integrated market and infrastructure environment in which data can be mobilized across regions, sectors, and levels of government.
Integrating Data Infrastructure and Computing Power
Liu’s article also points to one of the most important features of China’s emerging digital architecture: the integration of data infrastructure with computing power infrastructure. Data does not generate strategic value simply by existing. Large-scale datasets must be processed, modeled, analyzed, and applied. That requires computing power.
In this architecture, data provides the raw informational resource, while computing power transforms that resource into usable intelligence. National Data Infrastructure and the National Unified Computing Power Network operate as distinct but interdependent layers of China’s emerging digital system. One organizes and circulates the data; the other supplies the computational capacity needed to turn that data into economic, industrial, scientific, and governance value.
This helps explain why Liu places National Data Infrastructure within the broader construction of Digital China and New Type Infrastructure. Beijing is not building isolated systems. It is attempting to link data resources, cloud infrastructure, networks, computing power, standards, and security mechanisms into a coordinated national architecture. Liu’s reference to the coordinated development of cloud, networks, data, and computing power points directly to this systems logic.
Seen through the Digital China stack, this integration is especially important. Data and compute form foundational layers, but their value depends on the larger system built above and around them: platforms, applications, governance mechanisms, security frameworks, and innovation ecosystems. The strategic objective is not simply to possess more data or more computing power. It is to build a national system capable of converting those inputs into usable intelligence at scale.
This is why the integration of data infrastructure and computing power should be understood as more than a technical issue. It is a core feature of China’s approach to digital-era state capacity. The country that can organize data, allocate computing power, and apply both across industry, science, public administration, and social governance gains a structural advantage in the digital economy. In Liu’s framing, that is precisely the role National Data Infrastructure is meant to play within Digital China.
From Infrastructure to Smart Society
The ultimate objective of these efforts lies beyond infrastructure itself. Liu’s article is focused primarily on Digital China, National Data Infrastructure, data factor circulation, and the construction of a National Unified Data Market. But the logic of his argument points toward a broader Party-state vision: data-driven systems that can be applied across cities, industries, governance, and society.
In that broader framework, Smart Society represents the operational horizon of Digital China. It is the point at which data infrastructure, computing power, platforms, applications, and governance systems begin to function together across economic and social life. National Data Infrastructure provides the circulation layer; computing power transforms data into usable intelligence; platforms and applications deploy that intelligence across real-world scenarios.
Smart Cities are the most visible expression of this transformation. Urban systems increasingly depend on the integration of transportation data, public service data, industrial data, environmental data, and population-governance data into digital management platforms. But the same logic extends beyond cities. Industrial production, public administration, emergency management, social governance, and everyday services all become potential domains for data-driven coordination.
Seen this way, Liu’s article reveals more than a plan for infrastructure construction. It helps clarify how Beijing imagines the transition from data resources to data systems, and from data systems to digital governance capacity. The goal is not simply to build infrastructure, but to create the conditions under which data can be mobilized across the full operating environment of Digital China.
Strategic Implications: Digital China and the Emerging Global Data Order
Liu Liehong’s essay reflects a deeper shift in how Beijing understands the digital revolution. The central question is no longer simply who leads in individual technologies such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, or telecommunications networks. Increasingly, Chinese policymakers believe the digital age will be shaped by the systems capable of organizing, circulating, computing, and governing data at national scale.
Within the Digital China strategy, National Data Infrastructure forms the foundation of that system. It is designed to convert data from a dispersed resource into a governed production factor, link that resource to computing power, and support new forms of industrial upgrading, digital governance, and technological innovation. Liu’s article makes clear that this is not merely a technical project. It is infrastructure as strategy.
The global implication is significant. China is not only participating in the emerging data order; it is trying to build a model for it. If this architecture succeeds, Digital China will represent more than domestic modernization. It will mark an attempt to define the institutional and technological foundations of digital power in the twenty-first century.
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