The 19th National Party Congress outlined a grand blueprint to achieve a Moderately Prosperous Society In All Respects, to embark on a new journey of Comprehensively Building a Modernized Socialist Country, to realize the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation, and created a strategic plan to build a Cyber Great Power, Digital China, and a Smart Society. 党的十九大描绘了决胜全面建成小康社会、开启全面建设社会主义现代化国家新征程、实现中华民族伟大复兴的宏伟蓝图，对建设网络强国、数字中国、智慧社会作出战略部署。

Xi Jinping Congratulatory Letter to the First Digital China Summit
Fuzhou, Fujian Province
April 22, 2018

Revision note: This essay was last updated on June 03, 2026 to refresh the individual sections. This essay was first published on October 27, 2017.

China has designed a strategic system to build, secure, and transform the digital state. I call it China’s “digital triad.”

China’s “digital triad” is a unified system of digital statecraft integrating three high-level national strategies: Digital China, Cyber Great Power, and Smart Society. Through this framework, the Party seeks to organize and control data to ensure regime stability, build a digital-intelligent society with precise and efficient governance, and project power in the digital age.

Each component of the digital triad performs a distinct strategic function.1 Digital China serves as the national blueprint, building a unified, state-coordinated digital architecture that integrates infrastructure, data, and systems to drive development, governance, and national power. Cyber Great Power provides the security layer, asserting sovereignty and ensuring control over networks, data, and platforms while strengthening the state’s ability to defend and project power in cyberspace. Smart Society represents the implementation logic, advancing a national intelligentization strategy that transforms governance and society through the system-wide integration of data, platforms, and AI-enabled decision-making.

Together, these three components form a coherent model of digital statecraft aimed not only at domestic transformation, but at shaping the future architecture of the global digital order.2

Yet this strategic framework remains largely ignored.

Western analysts have examined Cyber Great Power, China’s cyber strategy, in some depth.3 But Digital China, its overarching national digital strategy, remains largely overlooked. And Smart Society, China’s intelligentization strategy, is nearly absent from Western discourse. What is also missing is recognition that these three strategies do not operate in isolation. They are synchronized components of a comprehensive, long-term digital project.

The digital triad is China’s system to build, secure, and transform the digital state:

  • Build → Digital China: infrastructure, data, and systems.
  • Secure → Cyber Great Power: sovereignty, control, and defense.
  • Transform → Smart Society: intelligentization of governance and life.

We urgently need more high-level attention to how the Party’s digital triad advances a coordinated national transformation. Even on this site, unpacking that synthesis is still in its early stages. But without it, our understanding of China’s long-term digital ambitions, and its potential to reshape global norms, remains incomplete.

Article Roadmap

If this is your first encounter with the digital triad, start with the explainers listed below. My research began with Digital China, so that guide is the most developed. The Cyber Great Power guide draws from classified Party-state documents dating back to 2013, offering rare insight into the origins of the Party’s national cyber strategy. Smart Society, a rapidly evolving concept aimed at building a digital-intelligent civilization, will continue to expand here as time permits.🤞

What is the Digital Triad?

In 2017, the 19th Party Congress report clearly proposed to build “a Cyber Great Power, Digital China, and a Smart Society,” and Digital China was written into Party and state programmatic documents for the first time. 2017年，党的十九大报告明确提出建设“网络强国、数字中国、智慧社会”，数字中国首次写入党和国家纲领性文件。

Cyberspace Administration of China, 2021 Digital China Development Report, July 23, 2022

What is Cyber Great Power?

Digital China is the concrete objective of building a Cyber Great Power. From the perspective of practical implementation, building a Cyber Great Power provides the foundation and technical support for building Digital China, while Digital China is the concrete manifestation and outcome of a Cyber Great Power… The Cyber Great Power strategy and Digital China construction complement and reinforce each other, and ultimately unite in the construction of a Modernized Socialist Nation. 数字中国则是网络强国建设的具体目标。从实际实施层面看，网络强国建设为数字中国建设提供了基础和技术支撑，数字中国是网络强国的具体表现和结果… 网络强国战略和数字中国建设相辅相成，相互促进，并最终统一于社会主义现代化国家建设。

Academician Liu Yunjie, Chinese Academy of Engineering, “Explaining the Cyber Great Power Layout in the 14th Five-Year Plan,” Outlook Weekly, January 27, 2021.

“Cyber Great Power,” not “cyber powerhouse”

Translating Cyber Great Power (网络强国) into English presents a special challenge, as both elements of the term, “cyber” and “great power,” raise distinct translation issues that need to be addressed individually.

What is Digital China?

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, Governance Events Column, Issue 2022-08, February 19, 2022

“Digital China,” not “digital China”

Digital China is the title of China’s national digital strategy and by standard writing convention is capitalized. The routine mistranslation of this title as “digital China” or “digital nation” masks its strategic significance, regardless of intent.

What is Smart Society?

Smart Society is a New Stage in the development of human society after Agricultural Society, Industrial Society, and Information Society, possessing extraordinary significance in revolutionizing the world. | 智慧社会是继农业社会、工业社会、信息社会之后人类社会发展的新阶段，具有革新世界的非凡意义。

Wu Xiaolin, Highlighting Chinese Values in Smart Society, Guangming Daily, January 21, 2021, Page 2

I use AI tools to support my editing, research, and translation process. Learn more on my AI Transparency Page.

Footnotes

  1. Some writers in China describe these three strategies collectively as the “three propositions” (三个命题). The title “digital triad” in not used in China (yet). I coined the title for ease of writing on this website. ↩︎
  2. Some Western experts have highlighted the interlocking nature of the CCP’s elite digital strategies. See for instance, Arcesati, Rebecca, “China’s Digital Transition: Balancing Development, Security, and Sustainability to Lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” in Carlo Secchi and Alessandro Gili, eds., “Digitalisation for Sustainable Infrastructure: The Road Ahead,” ISPI, October 17, 2022. ↩︎
  3. While not exhaustive, the following English-language papers, listed chronologically, offer excellent background on Cyber Great Power: Rogier Creemers, “The Chinese Conception of Cybersecurity: A Conceptual, Institutional, and Regulatory Genealogy,” Journal of Contemporary China, March 30, 2023; Emily de LaBruyère, “The Network Great-Power Strategy A Blueprint for China’s Digital Ambitions,” Asia Policy, April 28, 2021; Rush Doshi, Emily de La Bruyère, Nathan Picarsic, and John Ferguson, “China as a “Cyber Great Power” Beijing’s Two Voices in Telecommunications,” The Brookings Institution, April 5, 2021; Rogier Creemers, Graham Webster, Paul Triolo, Katharin Tai, Lorand Laskai, and Abigail Coplin, “Lexicon: 网络强国 (Wǎngluò Qiángguó)—Understanding and Translating a Crucial Slogan and ‘Cyber Superpower’ Ambition,” New America, May 31, 2018; and Elsa Kania, Samm Sacks, Paul Triolo, and Graham Webster, “China’s Strategic Thinking on Building Power in Cyberspace,” New America, September 25, 2017. ↩︎