“Beijing launched its field of dreams for data—the Eastern Data Western Computing project—on February 17. It is still in the headlines in China, but it hardly made the news here. It just does not sound that important. It is.”
David Dorman, “How China Will Dominate the Global Competition Over Data,” The National Interest, April 28, 2022
The Eastern Data Western Computing project has been the object of nearly continuous coverage in Chinese newspapers since February. By now, many (and perhaps most) Chinese Communist Party cadre and Chinese citizens could tell you it is the opening phase of China’s plan to construct a Nationally Integrated System (体系) of Big Data Centers. They could tell you it is a focal point of both the current Fourteenth Five-Year Plan and Fourteenth National Informatization Plan. They also could tell you it is a key technical sub-category of “Digital China,” Beijing’s comprehensive digital strategy, and that it has been tagged for acceleration right now.
The purpose of China’s Nationally Integrated System of Big Data Centers is to generate computing power; in fact, the system is sometimes simply called the “national computing power network.” When complete, it will process lots of data, fast. All the data. The head of research and development for Huawei’s Data Communication Product Line said that the long-term goal of the “computing power network” is to put the “entire country on one computer (全国一台计算机).” And notably, Digital China includes a military-civil fusion component. This network could be carrying it all: personal, business, government, Party, and perhaps even military data.
The construction job will be extraordinarily difficult—even according to Chinese experts. But cadre who read People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, learned on March 1 that in the digital economy era, “computing power is just like water conservation in the agricultural era or electricity in the industrial era.” It has become the new “foundation for development of the national economy.” It is also the “new focus of global competition.” All of this means that this is a contest that Beijing does not think it can lose.