Digital Triad—Strategic Design - Digital China Wins the Future

Tag: Digital Triad—Strategic Design

2 Posts

China Tower website highlights the Party's three elite digital strategies: Cyber Great Power, Digital China, and Smart Society

Explainer

China’s Digital Triad: How Beijing Plans to Build, Secure, and Transform the Digital State

June 3, 2026

In 2017, the 19th Party Congress political report proposed to build “Cyber Great Power, Digital China, and Smart Society,” and Digital China was written into Party and state programmatic documents for the first time.

Explainer

China’s Elite Digital Strategies are Dependent, Not Hierarchical

July 26, 2022

Key One: China has an elite digital triad of national strategies: Cyber Great Power, Digital China, and Smart Society. Together, they drive the country's digital-intelligent transformation into a Modernized Socialist Great Power. Although this website focuses on Digital China, understanding its full scope requires knowing all three.

Key Two: Digital China is both a strategy and a stack. The strategy—an ends, ways, and means framework—explains how the Party generates and employs digital power. The stack—a layered system architecture—shows how that power is built. Together, they provide an integrated model for understanding China’s national digital strategy.

Analysis—Original analysis of China’s digital strategies, policies, institutions, and strategic development.

Explainer—Comprehensive guides to the strategies, concepts, systems, and terminology shaping Digital China.

Strategy Milestone—Key documents, decisions, and developments that mark the evolution of China’s digital strategies.

Translation—English translations of important Chinese primary sources, with context and explanatory notes.

Update—Shorter reports on new digital policies, speeches, documents, and developments worth watching.

“The struggle between China and the United States in cyberspace is intensifying. The U.S. policy of containment against China has expanded from physical space to cyberspace, aiming to place China in a passive position. Cyber warfare is no longer a matter of whether we want to fight it or not; it has reached a point where we have no choice but to respond."
Zheng Bijian, Face the Challenge with Comprehensive Planning; Strive to Build a World Class Cyber Great Power in Ten Years, State Council Secretariat Second Bureau, April 3, 2013

“The report of the 19th National Party Congress stated that “the principal contradiction in our society has transformed into the contradiction between the people’s ever-growing need for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development.” This shift in contradictions is a change of global and historical significance, posing new demands on many aspects of our Party and country. Developing Digital China is about responding to these new changes and new demands, using digitalized means to resolve and address social contradictions. Against this backdrop, the central government explicitly put forward the new concept of building a “Smart Society” in the report.”
“The Mission of Digital China: Building a Smart Society,” Informatization of China Construction, August 29, 2018