With a decades-long personal tie to General Secretary Xi Jinping, the Digital China strategy is designed to lift China’s core competitiveness and societal efficiency through comprehensive digital transformation at the national level. Mostly unknown in the West, Digital China has profound implications for China’s developmental path, great power competition, and for the norms that will undergird the international system for decades to come.
David Dorman and John Hemmings, Digital China: The Strategy and Its Geopolitical Implications, Issues and Insights, February 20, 2023
How power is organized in the digital age.
The Party’s revision of historical materialism tells us that the primary competition we now face with China is between national digital systems: how data is organized, how digital infrastructure is built, and how governance is embedded in both. These systems will drive how economies function, how authority is exercised, and how societies are structured.
If we focus only on individual technologies, we don’t think about the systems being created. If we miss the systems, we don’t understand the nature of the competition we are facing.
We must move beyond a simple focus on technology.
We are centering our research, analysis, and policy on individual technologies like artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and robots. These are all important domains, and competition over them is real. But they are parts of a larger system.
The Party has engineered the Digital China strategy to prepare for future global competition over national digital systems. These support a nation’s ability to integrate data, infrastructure, and governance. What matters is not only innovation, but integration and application at scale.
We don’t talk about competing systems.
If we don’t talk about competing systems, we can’t develop responses, let alone effective ones. Some digital systems being created are market-driven, centered on private platforms and decentralized innovation. Others systems are regulatory, stressing privacy, rights, and constraints on data use.
Beijing is developing a different type of architecture: a state-coordinated system that integrates data, infrastructure, and governance for Party purpose. This model combines market mechanisms, centralized direction, and digital-intelligent technology to drive both economic development and societal control.
The Party talks about its model openly. I am not sure we are paying attention. When was the last time someone raised Digital China with you?
Let’s try to understand the system level, where Beijing is focused.
If we focus exclusively on technology and underestimate the systems being created, our understanding will be fragmented, or worse, faulty. We risk missing intent.
For over a decade, Digital China was often masked externally. Generally, it was Beijing doing the masking. Sometimes we were the ones doing it, albeit unintentionally. Either way, it’s time for that to stop.
The real danger we face is misreading the nature of the current and coming competition. That would be very much to Beijing’s advantage. And it is where we stand now.
The global implications are profound.
If Digital China works domestically, as the Party seeks, it will also work internationally, as the Party predicts.
At some level, its goals, national and international, will influence the future of global standards, institutional frameworks, and data governance.
Digital China is about China rise. But we must not forget that, as defined by the Party, Digital China‘s rise is global.