Author’s Note: This essay was updated on July 28, 2026. The revised version clarifies that “digital grand strategy” is my analytical characterization rather than Beijing’s formal terminology; a new explanatory footnote provides the criteria supporting this judgment.
Since the 18th Party Congress, the Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as its Core has been far-sighted, seized the major historical opportunities of Global Digitalized Development and Digitalized Transformation, and systemically planned and coordinated the construction of Digital China. 党的十八大以来，以习近平同志为核心的党中央高瞻远瞩，抓住全球数字化发展与数字化转型的重大历史机遇，系统谋划、统筹推进数字中国建设。
Cyberspace Administration of China, 2021 Digital China Development Report, July 23, 2022
Beijing’s strategic intent is not simply to win a technological race. It is to build a new digital-intelligent model of socialist modernization—one that demonstrates the continued vitality of Marxist theory, strengthens China’s national power and regime stability, and offers other countries an alternative path into the digital age. The Chinese Communist Party calls this strategy of national transformation Digital China.
Digital China is the Party’s overarching national strategy for using informatization, digitalization, and intelligentization to advance socialist modernization. The term also describes the integrated national system the strategy is intended to build and the national end state it is intended to produce.
In Chinese official and scholarly discourse, Digital China is often labeled simply—and accurately—as the country’s national digital strategy. But there is nothing simple about it. Its duration, scope, ideological purpose, central coordination, and integration of domestic transformation with international competition set it apart from conventional national digital strategies.
The character of Digital China is uniquely techno-ideological, but its ultimate purpose makes it best understood as the world’s first digital grand strategy: a Party-led national project to reorganize development, governance, and power through digital-intelligent systems.1
Technology Is the Means
For Digital China, technology is a means, not an end. Its ultimate purpose is ideological as well as developmental: to adapt Marxist theory to the digital age and demonstrate the practical superiority of a new digital-intelligent model of socialist modernization.
Technology provides the tools. Ideology defines the destination.
Viewed systemically, Digital China seeks to validate two closely connected propositions. The first is historical: Marxism can continue to guide the development of the forces of production under radically new technological conditions. The second is practical and international: socialism with Chinese characteristics can produce a more effective model of digital-age modernization than Western capitalist systems.
Together, these propositions define Digital China‘s ideological logic. It is both the strategy for constructing a new digital-intelligent model of socialist modernization and the national system intended to embody it.
Digital China is expected to play a central role in the reconstruction of the forces of production through what the Party now calls New Quality Productive Forces—a formulation that reinterprets a foundational concept in historical materialism.
Within this evolving framework, intelligent data is a central enabler of the “new quality” of productive forces: data that has been collected, integrated, computed, and converted into usable intelligence. First elevated as the key factor of the digital economy and later formally recognized as a new factor of production alongside land, labor, capital, and technology, data is distinguished by its capacity to combine with, reorganize, and amplify the others.
Building Digital China is General Secretary Xi Jinping’s answer to this era’s question on how to further unleash the development of the forces of production with innovation in science and technology as the core. 建设数字中国就是习近平总书记对于如何进一步解放以科技创新为核心的生产力的发展这一问题的时代答案。
Jiang Xiaoli and Liu Zhaokun, “Analysis of the Significance and Key Points of Constructing Digital China,” People’s Tribune Online, April 1, 2022
Official accounts place Xi Jinping at the center of this theoretical and strategic evolution. His contributions are portrayed as both predictive and directive: identifying the opportunities created by digital transformation, setting the ideological course for China’s rise in the digital age, and guiding domestic and international policy to support it.
Party leaders believe that successful implementation of Digital China will enable China to win the future.
A Strategy of National Transformation
Digital China is not a technology plan confined to the digital economy. It is a strategy for transforming the entire country.
Its reach extends across economic development, political governance, cultural construction, social management, ecological civilization, national security, scientific and technological innovation, and China’s engagement with the world. It seeks to integrate data, infrastructure, platforms, institutions, standards, applications, and governance into a nationally coordinated system.
In effect, Digital China is a large-scale Social System Engineering project: a deliberate effort to redesign the structures through which a modern socialist state develops, governs, competes, and exercises power.
Its ultimate national mission is to lay the informatized, digitalized, and intelligentized foundation for socialist modernization and National Rejuvenation. To fulfill that mission, Digital China must be both deeply transformative and deeply competitive. These are the defining features of its domestic and international roles.
Domestically, Digital China is intended to culminate in what Beijing calls a Smart Society: a digital-intelligent model of social organization designed to produce dramatic gains in both societal efficiency and social equity.
Smart Society is more than a collection of smart-city projects or digital public services. It is the envisioned social expression of Digital China—the point at which digital-intelligent systems become deeply embedded across governance, production, public administration, social services, and everyday life.
In Party discourse, a successful Smart Society would also carry ideological meaning. It would demonstrate to China’s citizens and to the world that socialist modernization can use digital-intelligent systems to deliver forms of development, governance, efficiency, and social coordination that Western capitalist models cannot match.
Internationally, Digital China is intended to support China’s emergence as an innovation power and strengthen its position across multiple strategic domains, civilian and military. Digital infrastructure, data systems, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, cyber capabilities, and digitally enabled governance are not treated as separate areas of policy. They are interconnected sources of Comprehensive National Power.
Taken together, these ambitions amount to a revolutionary claim about the current stage of human development: that a new model of modernization is emerging, led by a rising great power determined to embody and advance it.
Whoever can better recognize and seize the general trend of digitalization, and better adapt to and lead the developmental direction of new forces of production, will be able to win the new omnidirectional competition for Comprehensive National Power. 谁能更好认识和把握数字化大势，更好适应和引领新生产力发展方向，谁就能赢得新的全方位综合国力竞争。
“Digital China Wins the Future,” Outlook Weekly Magazine, “Authoritative” Governance Events Column, February 21, 2022
The Strategic Contest over Data
For Digital China to succeed, Beijing must prevail in what it increasingly treats as a central arena of great-power competition: the race to design and build a nationally unified system of rules, institutions, infrastructure, and technology for managing data and its intelligent application.
This strategic requirement explains Digital China’s intense focus on data.
Data must be collected, classified, secured, circulated, valued, integrated, computed, and converted into usable intelligence. It must support economic growth, social governance, technological innovation, public administration, national security, and military power. It must also be governed through institutions and technical systems capable of aligning its use with Party-state priorities.
Beijing presents this transformation as a new stage in National Informatization. The challenge is no longer simply to connect institutions or digitize information. It is to construct an integrated national system capable of turning data into a strategic resource, a factor of production, and a source of intelligent power.
Data governance and control are therefore not merely economic or technical concerns. PRC theorists increasingly present “Party control of data” as a new principle of political rule—extending the Party’s longstanding system of control over personnel, propaganda, and the military to the strategic resource of the digital age.
Digital China accordingly serves two inseparable purposes: advancing national modernization and strengthening the Party’s capacity to govern, direct development, manage society, and preserve political control under digital conditions.
Xi Jinping’s Strategic Lineage
For more than two decades, Xi Jinping has personally shaped the strategic lineage that became Digital China.
That lineage began with Digital Fujian in 2000, when Xi was governor of Fujian Province. The provincial experiment later became the acknowledged practical and intellectual starting point for Digital China, linking Xi’s work in Fujian to the national strategy he advanced as General Secretary.
Under Xi’s national leadership, this strategic lineage evolved from provincial informatization into a comprehensive framework for national transformation. What began in Fujian ultimately informed a strategy integrating economic development, governance, technology, security, ideology, and international competition across the entire country.
This continuity is significant. Digital China is not a recent response to artificial intelligence, data competition, or deteriorating relations with the United States. It is the product of a much longer strategic evolution—one that Xi Jinping has guided throughout his provincial and national leadership for more than two decades.
Party leaders now present Digital China as the strategy that will enable China to seize the opportunities of the digital revolution, accelerate socialist modernization, strengthen Comprehensive National Power, and gain the initiative in the digital age.
More strikingly, Digital China may be an underrecognized driver of the intensifying strategic competition between the United States and China.
The competition is not solely over particular technologies. Nor is it only about semiconductors, artificial intelligence, robots, telecommunications networks, data security, standards, or military capabilities considered separately.
At a deeper level, it is a competition between systems: over how digital power will be organized, how data will be governed, how technology will reshape the state and society, and which model of modernization will prove most capable of defining the digital future.
That is what makes Digital China so consequential—and so different from conventional national digital strategies.
Understanding where Digital China began, what it has become, and what it calls for now is the first step toward recognizing whether the United States and its partners face an undiagnosed techno-ideological challenge to their own national interests.
I believe we do.
Footnote
- “Digital grand strategy” is my analytical characterization, not an official Chinese term. Grand strategy connects a state’s highest political objectives with the resources needed to achieve them over time. Digital China meets that test unusually well. It serves ultimate national goals, including socialist modernization, National Rejuvenation, political control, and international competitiveness; extends across economic development, governance, technology, data, security, ideology, and China’s engagement with the world; and provides a long-term, centrally coordinated framework for integrating these domains. It also possesses a clear ends–ways–means structure: the ends are national transformation and strategic advantage; the way is systemic digital-intelligent modernization; and the means include infrastructure, data resources, technology, institutions, standards, applications, and governance capacity. Digital China is not China’s entire grand strategy, but its duration, scope, ideological purpose, and integration of domestic transformation with international competition make it what I believe is the world’s first digital grand strategy. ↩︎
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