Strategy Milestone: Digital China Elevated to Global Strategy

Milestone Summary

What happened:
On February 27, 2023, the Central Committee and State Council issued the Plan for the Global Layout of Digital China Construction, formally integrating the international environment into Digital China’s top-level design.

Why it matters:
This marked Digital China’s elevation from a primarily domestic transformation strategy to a global strategy, coordinating domestic and international digital development for the first time.

Strategic function:
Digital China was redesignated as the “Global Strategy for Digital China Construction in the New Era,” seeking to align institutions, markets, rules, and technologies across borders.

Systemic impact:
The plan introduced a unified global framework, domestic and international, under a single strategic architecture.

Long-term signal:
Beijing intends not only to digitalize China, but to shape global digital norms, governance, and cooperation frameworks.

February 27, 2023: Digital China Goes Global

The Central Government formally elevated Digital China to a global strategy on February 27, 2023, with the release of the Plan for the Global Layout of Digital China Construction (数字中国建设整体布局规划). For the first time, the international environment was incorporated directly into Digital China’s top-level design.

This move redefined Digital China as the “Global Strategy for Digital China Construction in the New Era” (新时代数字中国建设的整体战略), framing the strategy from what Party documents describe as the “global and strategic heights” of national development.

Core Evolution

The plan clarified that Digital China would now be implemented under a unified “2522” global framework, explicitly coordinating the domestic and international environments:

Two Foundations:
New Type (Digital) Infrastructure; Data Element Resource System
Five-Sphere Integrated Plan:
Economy, Government, Society, Culture, Ecology
Two Capabilities:
Digital Security Barrier; Digital Technology Innovation System
Two Environments:
Domestic Digital Governance Ecosystem; International Cooperation in the Digital Domain

Crucially, the plan emphasized optimizing both domestic and international environments for digitalized development (优化数字化发展国内国际“两个环境”).

Why This Was a Turning Point

This was not a cosmetic update. The plan fundamentally altered Digital China’s strategic geometry.

Before February 2023, Digital China’s emphasis was overwhelmingly domestic. International elements existed, but they were secondary. The new plan formally fused the two, creating a single global layout:

Digital China (domestic focus) + Digital China (international focus) = Digital China (global strategy)

At the same time, the plan served as the launch platform for the first coordinated overseas propaganda narrative on Digital China, emphasizing:

“open and win-win” digital cooperation;
participation in multilateral digital governance frameworks;
shaping international rules for cross-border data flows.

This pairing—strategic redesign + narrative rollout—underscores how deliberate the shift was.

Analytical Bottom Line

The February 27, 2023 plan crystallized nearly a decade of evolving Party thinking on Digital China. It transformed Digital China from a national digital modernization project into a globally oriented system-building strategy, aimed at enhancing China’s competitive position through coordinated development of digital institutions, markets, rules, and technologies.

If there is a single policy document that marks the moment Digital China “went global,” this is it.