The construction of New Type Infrastructure… must be accelerated. This is not only an inherent requirement for strengthening Cyber Great Power, but also the fundamental prerequisite for Building Digital China and developing our country’s information industry.
“CAE Academician Liu Yunjie Explains Cyber Great Power Layout in 14th Five-Year Plan (中国工程院院士刘韵洁: “十四五”网络强国如何布局),” Outlook Weekly (瞭望), January 27, 2021.
Despite its strategic significance, New Type Infrastructure remains poorly understood outside China. Much of this stems from persistent mistranslations that flatten the Party term-of-art into generic English.
China’s New Type Infrastructure (新型基础设施) is the Party’s core industrial policy framework for the digital age. As a formal Party tifa (term-of-art), it describes a strategic, systemic program to build the digitalized ecosystem required for National Informatization. It is also directly linked to China’s three elite digital strategies—Cyber Great Power, Digital China, and Smart Society—as a critical “means” enabler.
The logic of “full-stack” innovation and developing a “full-stack” architecture to support China’s elite digital strategies was cemented when New Type Infrastructure was publicly defined by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) on April 20, 2020. Rather than viewing digital technologies like computing power, artificial intelligence, big data, and gigabit optical as separate domains, the NDRC formally reconceptualized them as interdependent elements of New Type Infrastructure and essential drivers of “Digitalized Development.”
New Type Infrastructure vs. new infrastructure
In English-language discourse, including PRC state-run English-language media, the formal tifa of New Type Infrastructure (NTI) is often diminished in translation to the generic “new infrastructure.”1 This linguistic flattening collapses three distinct infrastructure categories into an ambiguous whole. When translated generically into English as “new infrastructure,” there is simply no way to distinguish between infrastructure in China that has been: (1) “newly” installed, (2) other types of new infrastructure (like roads or an airport), or critically, (3) advanced digital infrastructure designed to support the Party’s elite national digital strategies.
Because these concepts are rendered identically in English, the underlying strategic intent of NTI is washed away. Within PRC state-run English-language media, this lack of precision likely serves as a calculated form of obfuscation, ensuring the true scale and intent of the program remains hidden in plain sight.
Further complicating matters, the term-of-art “New Type Infrastructure Construction,” (Eight characters: 新型基础设施建设), is routinely shortened domestically to “New Type Infrastructure” (Six characters: 新型基础设施), and then to an even more abbreviated form (Three characters: 新基建). For Party members and the Chinese public, these are well established and widely understood abbreviations for NTI. For those outside China, it is all just “new infrastructure.”
Industrial policy for the digital age
Xi Jinping’s approach to New Type Infrastructure is systemic, not component focused. Western analysis often isolates one technology, like 5G or Artificial Intelligence or robots, without seeing the ecosystems Beijing is trying to construct around them. This analytical approach masks Xi’s direction to systemically accelerate the development and implementation of entire tiered categories (or ecosystems) of digital technologies in support of the Party’s strategic aim of National Informatization.
Under NTI, technologies are arranged into tiered categories with interconnected missions. For example, 5G is not just mobile telecommunications, it is a backbone for the Industrial Internet, designed to rewire industrial clusters and supply chains. Artificial Intelligence is not an isolated capability, it depends on high quality data, unified infrastructure, and computing power to realize what the Party calls digital socialism in practice. PRC expert commentators even debate the efficacy of building out entire sub-categories of digital infrastructure before the applications exist to use it fully, including in the core area of data intelligence.
The Party thinks it has it right. Digital China wins the future, not the present. And NTI is one of the means through which that future is being engineered. Our analytical focus on China’s digital policy has tended to be much narrower than Beijing’s stated goals. In short, we are missing the big picture of what the Party is attempting to accomplish.
The strategic meaning of New Type Infrastructure
In the context of China’s elite digital strategies, New Type Infrastructure supports the construction of three major resource systems, the “means” required for National Informatization. These are:
(1) Data Element Resource System (数据要素资源体系) is the centerpiece of China’s emerging data governance regime. It is anchored in the principle that data is a new revolutionary factor of production.
(2) Information Infrastructure System (信息基础设施体系) is the foundational national digital backbone. It seeks a unified, sustainable approach to building digital ecosystems.
(3) Information Technology Industrial Ecosystem (信息技术产业生态体系) is the innovation and industrial base that supports national competitiveness. It is closely linked to Cyber Great Power’s calls to master core technologies and strengthen cyber talent.
Together, these three systems supply the underlying technical, industrial, and systemic capacity necessary to realize Xi Jinping’s long-term digital vision.
NTI’s Three Main Directions
At a National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) press conference on April 20, 2020, New Type Infrastructure was formally defined as consisting of “Three Main Directions” (三大主要方向). Each of the three directions is expected to commonly drive investment, innovation, and the overall economy towards High Quality Development, but each differs in its primary thrust:
(1) Information Infrastructure” (信息基础设施) is intended to focus on delivering next-generation information and communications technologies for network creation, expansion, and interconnection.
(2) Integrated Infrastructure” (融合基础设施] is intended to focus at the onset on the digital transformation of traditional infrastructure like energy and transportation.2
(3) Innovative Infrastructure” (创新基础设施) is intended to focus on industrial applications providing the widest public benefit in areas such as technology development, scientific research and science education, and industrial and manufacturing technology.
The Three Main Directions all have associated categories (see graphic below). The NDRC explained that the categories were illustrative only as the NTI concept was still evolving in parallel with emerging technologies and concepts. A state-run media commentary on the press conference described the NDRC statement as properly cautious based on the magnitude of what was being described: “the main pathway for the next step in China’s economic development (中国下一步经济发展的主要路径).”
As the most developed direction, Information Infrastructure was expanded during the NDRC press conference into both categories and subcategories. Media commentators in industry publications highlighted that Information Infrastructure prioritizes technology development and deployment at all levels: technologies that are under deployment like 5G, technologies that are under development like 5.5G, and technologies still in the laboratory like 6G. The NDRC highlighted that the public should expect changes and additions to NTI main directions, categories, and subcategories going forward, a point of particular interest to PRC business investors.
Tracing the evolution of New Type Infrastructure
The emergence of NTI can be summarized in three major steps, though dozens of additional smaller events also shaped its development.
2016: Conceptual Emergence
The 13th Five-Year National Informatization Plan (2016-2020), published by the State Council in December 2016, contained the first official reference to the term New Type Infrastructure, although still in an unjelled form.3 The term appears inside a highlighted box, properly aligned with technologies like the Industrial Internet, but is only used in a general sense.
Notably, the 13th Five-Year National Informatization Plan also described Digital China as the Developmental Goal (发展目标) of National Informatization.
2018: Strategic Attention
The first appearance of the term New Type Infrastructure at a central-level meeting occurred at the Central Economic Work Conference chaired by Xi Jinping in December 2018. The conference readout focused on key economic tasks for 2019, including promoting a strong domestic market. In this context, increased investment in NTI construction was highlighted as an economic driver, citing Artificial Intelligence, the Industrial Internet, and the Internet-of-Things as examples.
Notably, the conference readout also revealed that the formal party definition of NTI was still under development, as technologies such as 5G (specifically commercial use of 5G), which would later be designated a core NTI subcategory, were specifically excluded.
2020: Formal Definition and Strategic Elevation
The term New Type Infrastructure was publicly defined for the first time at an NDRC press conference on April 20, 2020. The conference defined NTI as an “infrastructure system” (基础设施体系) that supports digital transformation, intelligent upgrading, and integrative innovation. The system is guided by the “New Development Concept,” driven by technological innovation, based on information networks, and answers the requirement for “High Quality Development.”
This marked NTI’s transition from a developmental idea to an institutionalized national strategy.
Why it matters
New Type Infrastructure is not a simple technology upgrade. It is the industrial scaffolding of Digital China, the technical backbone of Xi Jinping’s digital grand strategy, and an essential ingredient in China’s long-term attempt to modernize its economic base, achieve cyber and data sovereignty, strengthen system-level social governance, and compete as a global digital great power.
And yet, because the term is often flattened into “new infrastructure,” its meaning is lost in most Western analysis. New Type Infrastructure might be the most important part of the Digital China strategy that is least known outside China. Despite the term’s emergence in 2016, and its public unveiling and formal designation by Beijing in 2020, there is still no standard English translation for New Type Infrastructure.
Understanding New Type Infrastructure, its structure, intent, and evolution, is essential to understanding Digital China itself. It reveals the scale of Beijing’s ambition, the direction of China’s digital industrial policy, and the strategic logic driving one of the most consequential national projects of the 21st century.
Footnotes
- The acronym “NTI” (for New Type Infrastructure) is not used in or by China. I coined “NTI” for ease of writing on this website and elsewhere. ↩︎
- 融合基础设施 is variously translated as Integrated/Converged/Fused Infrastructure both inside and outside China. “Integrated Infrastructure” is currently the translation of choice in China, albeit irregularly, so I use it here also for consistency. However, in this context, “fused” may be a better fit. Additional formal use of the term in China will help clarify the best translation. ↩︎
- The origins of the New Type Infrastructure concept, although not the term itself, was apparent as early as the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) when the first indicators of new thinking on the “digital transformation” of specific types of traditional infrastructure and specific segments of the economic system first appeared. Although the term “New Type Infrastructure” did not also appear in the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020), the evolving concept had significantly matured. Part Six of the 13th Five-Year Plan titled “The Cyber Economy,” included the first references to “Information Infrastructure” and “Innovative Infrastructure,” terms that would be defined by the National Development and Reform Commission in 2020 as NTI categories, as well as other digital technologies that would later fall into NTI’s “Integrated Infrastructure” category. However, Part Six lacked the structure and clarity of what would later jell into the NTI concept. ↩︎