Cities are the comprehensive carriers for advancing Digital China. From top-level design to specific practices, the more Smart Cities “evolve,” the more urban life “renews.” 城市是推进数字中国建设的综合载体，从顶层设计到具体实践，智慧城市越“进化”，百姓生活越“向新”。
Li Junqiang 李君强， “‘Evolving’ Cities, ‘Renewed’ Living (People’s Commentary) 城市“进化”，生活“向新”（人民时评), People’s Daily人民日报, December 1, 2025, Page 5
Smart Cities are where Digital China becomes real.
People’s Daily is telling domestic audiences, and signaling to foreign observers, that the next stage of Digital China will be decided in cities. Beijing’s goal is not merely to win a technology race. It is to build Digital China as a coherent, urban, lived system: a functioning model of digitalized socialist modernization that can be governed at scale, experienced by citizens, and presented internationally as a new path of modernization.
This is why understanding the Party’s concept of Smart Cities is important. They are no longer just pilot projects, local experiments, or technology showcases. They are becoming the comprehensive carriers of Digital China — the places where data governance, digital economy, urban management, public services, and industry-city fusion are meant to converge into a single operating system.
This is how the Party believes the digital age will be won: not through isolated breakthroughs, but through the construction of a digital civilization that is comprehensive, functioning, and attractive.
Context matters, and too often we miss it.
Framing Smart Cities inside Digital China
A new People’s Daily commentary, “‘Evolving’ Cities, ‘Renewed’ Living,” offers one of the clearest statements yet of how the Party frames Smart Cities within Digital China. Smart Cities are no longer treated as discrete pockets of innovation. They are portrayed as living digital organisms whose “blood vessels” and “nervous system” are powered by data — precisely the architecture Digital China seeks to universalize.
The commentary highlights a subtle but important shift. Smart Cities are now the urban implementation layer of Digital China. They are the terrain where data governance, digital economy, urban management, social services, and industry-city fusion are integrated into a single system.
Smart Cities in Theory: Digitalizing the Five Sphere Integrated Plan
The Party’s current framing rests on a decade of conceptual evolution.
In his Political Report to the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, Xi Jinping formally proposed building a Smart Society for the first time. This was the final push of a central government effort that began in October 2014 to impose order on the “scattered and disorderly approach” to Smart Cities that had largely been driven at the local level until that time. The Party theory supporting Xi’s new approach had two theoretical components.
First, Smart Society served as a Sinicized and modernized version of the Smart City concept, a term that had originated outside China decades earlier. With the new Party capture of the term, the focus of Smart Society and New Type Smart Cities would now be on the fused digitalized transformation of urban and rural environments, and the fused digitalized transformation of city and industry as a single organism.
The second theoretical move was even broader. Smart Society and New Type Smart Cities became vehicles for applying digitalized transformation across the Five Sphere Integrated Plan, a theoretical innovation attributed to Xi Jinping personally. In this sense, the Smart City is not just an urban management project. It is a city-scale mechanism for coordinating Digital China across a digitalized economy, government, society, culture, and ecology.
Theory and strategy were now aligned. Smart Cities would embody the digital future the Party envisions.
Smart Cities in Practice: Whole-of-City Digitalized Transformation
Building on that theoretical foundation, today’s People’s Daily commentary highlights a specialized digital term: Whole-of-City (All Domain) Digitalized Transformation (城市全域数字化转型).1 This is the Party’s attempt to formalize what has been emerging in fragmented form for more than a decade.
The term appeared officially in the May 2024 Guiding Opinions on Deeping the Development of Smart Cities and Advancing Whole-of-City Digitalized Transformation (关于深化智慧城市发展 推进城市全域数字化转型的指导意见), issued by the National Development and Reform Commission, joined by the National Data Administration, Ministry of Finance, and Ministry of Natural Resources. In November 2024, the National Data Administration formally defined it as a new concept (新理念) designed to unify China’s emerging data governance regime.
According to the NDA’s definition, Whole-of-City Digitalized Transformation is:
A new model of urban High Quality Development in which cities, guided by the overarching goal of comprehensively deepening data integration, connectivity, and utilization, use digital technologies and institutional innovation to reshape technological architecture, transform urban management processes, and achieve deep fusion of industry and city.
This is the Party’s new blueprint for the digitalized city: not a sectoral upgrade, but a holistic reengineering of the entire urban ecosystem.
In December 2024, the NDA launched a national campaign to standardize and popularize the term. In October 2025, the National Development and Reform Commission, joined by the National Data Administration, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Natural Resources, and Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, issued the Action Plan on Deepening Smart City Development and Advancing All-Domain Digitalized Transformation (深化智慧城市发展推进全域数字化转型行动计划), marking the next phase of implementation.
Whole-of-City Digitalized Transformation positions cities, not individual industries, as the primary environments in which Digital China becomes real: fully digitalized and data-driven. Smart Cities are the conceptual bridge between the informatized infrastructure of today’s Digital China and the systemic, intelligentized ecosystem envisioned in tomorrow’s Smart Society.
Three New Smart City Concepts
The People’s Daily commentary elevates three ideas that now sit at the center of the New Type Smart City concept.
First, Smart Cities are the operational terrain where Digital China becomes real. Cities integrate the “blood vessels” of data resources, the “nervous system” of sensing and perception, and the “organs” of daily life. Transportation, senior care, environmental management, emergency response, and public services are not treated as isolated use cases. They are the functional organs of a larger urban digital system.
Second, governance modernization is the strategic core, not technology alone. Shanghai’s “One Network,” Hangzhou’s “City Brain,” and Xiong’an’s “Digital Twin City” are cited not merely for their novelty, but for their ability to unify data flows, dissolve bureaucratic silos, and enable platform interoperability. The emphasis is squarely on coordinated, effective, and efficient governance. These are all core Digital China principles.
Third, All-Domain Transformation 全域转型 is now the direction of travel. Smart City development is shifting from fragmented pilots to systemic, whole-of-city digitalization. This aligns with the National Data Administration’s broader push to build a unified data factor market, deepen data integration, and eliminate “data islands.”
The Broader Context is Critical
Cities must now become the fully digitalized, data-driven environments in which Digital China is lived and experienced. Urban modernization, digitalized governance, and intelligent public services are no longer subsets of Digital China. They are its concrete form.
Beijing’s strategic intent is not simply to outcompete technologically. It is to build a functioning model of digital civilization that demonstrates the feasibility of Digital China as a new path of modernization. Smart Cities are the road to that goal.
Winning the digital age, in the Party’s view, is about winning the model: creating a system that appears capable, scalable, governable, and attractive enough for others to study, adapt, or follow.
The contest will not be won by counting technologies alone. It will be won by understanding the model China is trying to build.
Footnote
- 全域 is an abbreviated form of 全领域. “Urban All-Domain Digitalized Transformation” is the literal translation of “城市全域数字化转型.” The best contextual translation is “Whole-of-City Digitalized Transformation.” ↩︎