Last revised on December 20, 2024: See Joshua Baughman’s latest work exploring Digital China and intelligentized warfare in Cyber Defense Review.
After 2021 was dubbed “year one of the metaverse” in China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continued to pursue rapid advancement in metaverse related technologies as part of Xi Jinping’s comprehensive digital grand strategy known as “Digital China.”
Joshua Baughman, “Enhancing the Battleverse: The People’s Liberation Army’s Digital Twin Strategy,” Military Cyber Affairs, May 17, 2023
Joshua Baughman’s essay in Military Cyber Affairs explores the relationship between metaverse-adjacent technologies like digital twins and the Digital China strategy, with a primary focus on how this technology ecosystem facilitates the PLA’s long-term vision of intelligentized warfare. His work is a notable example of the growing analytical convergence on China’s national digital strategy, in this case the strategic frameworks and technology ecosystems that have been central to this site’s research.
While the metaverse and digital twins were not part of the original 2020 list of New Type Infrastructure (NTI), digital twins did appear briefly in both the Plan for the Global Layout of Digital China Construction released in February 2023, and as Joshua Baughman notes, the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Informatization in December 2021. These references provide support for Baughman’s analysis and suggest that digital twin development may have been integrated into later rounds of NTI planning.
Analytical Convergence
Most relevant to this website, Joshua Baughman and I appear to have drawn from a substantial and overlapping set of Chinese-language sources on Digital China, which may explain several areas of conceptual convergence. His analysis aligns with a set of foundational themes that have also appeared in earlier research on this site and in the paper John Hemmings and I published in February 2023, Digital China: The Strategy and Its Geopolitical Implications. These themes include:
- Characterizing Digital China as a digital grand strategy;
- Identifying “Build Digital China” (建设数字中国) as a core Party term-of-art;
- Distinguishing Digital China from purely commercial or industrial initiatives; and
- Describing the strategy’s end-state as the digital transformation of the nation.
Example of Parallel Framing
Joshua Baughman wrote in Military Cyber Affairs (May 2023):
The importance of digital twin technology can be traced all the way to the top of the Chinese Communist Party as part of Xi Jinping’s comprehensive digital grand strategy known as “Build Digital China” [建设数字中国] or most often just called “Digital China” [数字中国]. Xi views “Digital China” as not simply a commercial or industrial strategy, but an all-of-nation effort to digitally transform China.
John Hemmings & Dorman wrote in Issues and Insights (February 2023):
Over the past decade, China has been immersed in a comprehensive digital strategy of grand proportions, a strategy known by the Chinese Communist Party term-of-art “Build Digital China” (建设数字中国) or most often just called “Digital China” ( 数字中国). While sounding much like a commercial or industrial strategy, Digital China is not described as such internally. In broadest terms, it is a major strategic decision made by Xi Jinping in the aftermath of the 18th Party Congress in 2012 to digitally transform the nation.
The similarities likely reflect engagement with the same source documents and the limited size of the English-language Digital China literature at the time. As more analysts work directly with Chinese primary materials, such conceptual overlap is likely to increase.
Update October 20, 2023: Joshua Baughman at HammerCon 2023
Joshua Baughman’s subsequent presentation at HammerCon 2023, “Enhancing the Battleverse: China’s Digital Twin Strategy,” includes several themes that are strikingly similar to ongoing Digital China research on this website and core concepts in the Hemmings-Dorman paper. These include:
- China’s digital grand strategy (a pioneering theme in the Hemmings-Dorman paper);
- The digital transformation of the Five Sphere Integrated Plan (first described in English on this website);
- The CCP’s “digital triad” (I coined the term);
- Digital China seeks to Win the Future (hence, the title of this website);
- The obscurity of Digital China in the West (a central theme of this website); and
- Xi Jinping’s personal connection to Digital China.
These topics have been central to understanding Digital China. Their appearance in Baughman’s work reflects a growing analytical consensus as more researchers dig into the underlying Chinese policy architecture.
A video clip from Joshua Baughman’s presentation at HammerCon 2023 follows below. Remarkably, his summary slide parallels core analysis published on this website and in the Dorman-Hemmings Issues and Insights paper on Digital China. I just wish I could have heard Baughman’s later presentation on Digital China at Fort Meade.
Update December 20, 2024: Joshua Baughman in Cyber Defense Review
Joshua Baughman’s latest piece, The Path to China’s Intelligentized Warfare: Converging on the Metaverse Battlefield, again touches on Digital China and incorporates themes familiar to readers of this site. For example:
In this vision, the metaverse becomes central not only to China’s broader societal transformation under ‘Digital China’ (the world’s first digital grand strategy) — which aims at ‘winning the future’ — but also a defining feature of future warfare.
As the field expands, it is encouraging to see multiple analysts reaching similar interpretations based on close reading of the same source ecosystem. Digital China remains under-studied, and work like Baughman’s helps broaden understanding of both the strategic and military dimensions of China’s digital transformation.