New growth impetus spurs local development

Industries, investment and consumption gain as online economy evolves fast

China's digital economy is entering a new stage of development wherein emphasis will be more on business-oriented applications like industrial internet, which can facilitate integration of the digital and real economies, government officials and experts said.

Sensing the trend, local governments are accelerating the digital transformation and upgrade of industries, which is expected to fuel China's economic growth and innovation-driven high-quality development in spite of numerous challenges and external uncertainties.

Thirty-one provincial regions in the Chinese mainland have all highlighted the goal of developing the digital economy in their economic development plans.

Shanghai, for instance, aims to improve the output of its digital economy-related core industries to 18 percent of the city's GDP in the coming four years from 15 percent last year when the city's GDP was 4.47 trillion yuan ($648.93 billion).

The output of the digital economy-related core industries of Zhejiang province is expected to reach 1.6 trillion yuan by 2027, according to its plan.

Wang Zhiqin, vice-president of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said the ultimate reason behind boosting the development of the digital economy is that it will bring new growth impetus to local economic development, especially in industries, investment and consumption.

According to her, previously, China's digital economy was chiefly driven by consumer-oriented internet applications like e-commerce, but now business-oriented applications like industrial internet are playing a significantly bigger role. This shows that improvements have been made to the digital economy structure.

Well aware of the change, local governments have mapped out specific measures to develop the digital economy, with each province's or region's specific goals slightly different from those of others, based on the development level of its own digital economy. For instance, industrial digitalization will be prioritized in manufacturing clusters while computing centers will be prioritized in energy-rich regions.

For instance, Central China's Henan province, home to the world's largest iPhone factory, will invest 50 billion yuan on digital infrastructure expansion, according to a work plan recently released by the Henan Development and Reform Commission.

The province will also promote the digital transformation of its manufacturing sector. This would involve building 150 smart factories and 10 provincial-designated industrial internet platforms.

Local governments' efforts to accelerate the development of the digital economy are in line with China's plan to boost the output of core industries of the country's digital economy to 10 percent of the country's GDP by 2025, up from 7.8 percent in 2020, as noted in China's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25). China's GDP in 2022 was 121 trillion yuan.

China will take solid steps to build digital infrastructure and data resource systems, and to promote the in-depth integration of digital technologies with the economy, politics, culture, society and ecology, according to a plan jointly released by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council, China's Cabinet, on Feb 27.

The plan stated that important progress will be made in the construction of a digital China by 2025, with effective interconnectivity in digital infrastructure, a significantly improved digital economy, and major breakthroughs achieved in digital technology innovation.

In March, China also announced a plan to establish a national data bureau, which is expected to give full play to the value of data, quicken the building of basic systems for data, and inject strong impetus into the digital economy.