Key technology to boost China’s digital drive – World

The digital economy is acquiring at an unparalleled speed, having a wide variety of impacts. It is turning into a key power in reshaping the worldwide financial structure and altering the international aggressive landscape. It has also come to be an significant engine and a new expansion point driving China”s economic climate.

The modern once-a-year conference of the Boao Forum for Asia, held in Hainan province, and the Worldwide Finance Forum in Beijing revealed the relevance of marketing the sustainable and healthy advancement of the digital financial state and drew a photograph of the potential of China’s electronic economic system that is moving into a new stage of enhancement.

The COVID-19 pandemic is modifying the world-wide economic get. In accordance to the Globe Bank, 93 percent of the world’s economies skilled a big economic downturn in 2020. Nonetheless, versus this backdrop, the electronic financial system is displaying robust resilience. In modern many years, China has become a world-wide leader in the progress of the electronic overall economy at scale. In 2020, China’s digital financial system was worthy of 39.2 trillion yuan ($5.9 trillion), the next most significant in the globe. In comparison with 2005, the size of China’s electronic overall economy has doubled 15 instances in 15 several years, an remarkable expansion fee.

China’s digital business is expanding at a fast pace. In the earlier quite a few yrs, China’s international innovation index position has greater substantially, and the revenue of the program and data technology support field has grown from 4.28 trillion yuan in 2015 to 8.16 trillion yuan in 2020, with an typical annual expansion amount of 13.8 percent－much better than the regular yearly GDP advancement fee.

In terms of digital infrastructure, China has constructed the world’s biggest fiber optic network, driven by the Broadband China system and other significant procedures. By the 1st quarter of 2022, China had opened about 1.6 million 5G foundation stations, accounting for a lot more than 60 per cent of the world’s complete, and the number of 5G terminal customers arrived at 403 million.

In conditions of the digital consumer market place, China’s enormous net consumer base has recognized a industry advantage. In December, the quantity of world-wide-web buyers in China reached about 1.03 billion, and China was the world’s premier electronic retailing market place for the ninth consecutive calendar year.

China’s digital overall economy is characterized by acquiring infrastructure as the core, pc technological innovation as the foundation and deep integration with numerous industries. China has been vigorously developing its digital economy infrastructure, and in 2018 proposed the thought of “new infrastructure “to assure the sustainable improvement of the electronic economic climate.

In February, the nation’s “east knowledge, west computing” venture was released. This is a national-degree industrial system for facts facilities, with nationwide advice driving the rational allocation of methods across regions. In addition, the electronic financial system addresses most socioeconomic industries, such as agriculture, industry, and the company sector, as well as govt, reflecting the complete integration of the digital overall economy into the socioeconomic cloth of the region.

China’s digital financial system employs personal computer details technologies to develop important knowledge with the enable of details technology such as databases, information and facts program and algorithms, and utilizes information as a manufacturing component that is embedded far more and additional deeply into the creation distribution system of a variety of industries and fields.

For a prolonged time, databases have been monopolized by abroad giants, and the specialized obstacles are deep, but domestic enterprises are step by step rising their marketplace share immediately after many years of technological know-how development and accumulation of knowledge. For case in point, the Huawei GaussDB database, whose performance has achieved the major amount, and its FusionInsight massive facts system are applied in much more than 60 international locations and locations, serving additional than 3,000 government and company shoppers, with extra than 800 company partners. They are broadly utilized by governments, as effectively as the production, transportation and other sectors.

China has a substantial electronic overall economy, but there is a great deal operate to do. For occasion, the digital economy’s share of GDP is a great deal decrease than that of quite a few developed nations around the world, this sort of as Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom.

In 2020, China’s electronic economy accounted for only 38.6 % of its GDP, though Germany’s electronic financial state accounted for 66.7 p.c of its GDP, adopted by the US at 66 percent. The motive for this is that China is generally developing those people industries at the software stage and relying on scale, instead than technology, as its major growth pressure. China nonetheless requires to grasp vital systems to make its electronic overall economy sustainable. At present, China is nonetheless constrained by the US and other produced countries in the most critical technologies, these kinds of as semiconductors and running programs, and this constraint is much more noticeable in the Sino-US engineering levels of competition.

China’s financial state is now at a significant phase of transformation of its advancement method and dynamics. The fourth industrial revolution, pushed by artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, big facts, the web of factors and other fundamental electronic systems, with the flourishing of electronic financial system as the major material, delivers an crucial chance for China’s economy to move up.

The great importance and strategic worth of the electronic economy has develop into more notable amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and the opposition amongst China, the US and Europe in the digital economic system is powerful. China requires to adhere to independent and open innovation and conquer core technologies to stay aggressive.

Eventually, China requirements to create extra proactive industrial and innovation guidelines that guidance knowledge-intense functions and improve the regulatory technique with details components as the main, so that the marketplace can create in a much more standardized and much healthier way.

The author is previous minister of tourism of Brazil and a professor of public coverage at the School of Community Coverage and Management at Tsinghua College.