Dr. John Hemmings is of the Pacific Forum in Hawaii. The forum has a report on China and geopolitics. He speaks on their findings on Digital China and Xi Jinping’s digital strategy for China.
The project
This has been a long labor of love for my colleague and I, Dave Dorman. We’ve been working on this project for about 18 months, and so the briefing today will reflect some of our findings. And as we note, they’re not from just yesterday. We’ve been really working on this for a while.
Just to let you know, two days ago a slew of articles appeared in the Chinese state media. I encourage you to look at them. In the China Daily, the Global Times, the South China Morning Post, Xinhua – all essentially addressing a new announcement from the state council and the central committee of the CCP, essentially making a guidance note on Digital China. I think the article from South China Morning Post is very interesting and useful in terms of an overarching understanding of what that is, but I want to point out that these articles were essentially the first real push in the English-language media from China, but that the Chinese media and the Chinese state and the Chinese party have been working on Digital China for some years. In fact, we track it all the way back to 2012, but really it has emerged to become a very important strategy.
And if I can go to the slides. I can’t see if we’re on the second slide, but if I can ask that we can go to the primary findings of our paper that would be wonderful. So, yeah, what are we here to tell you about and what are the sort of important headlines from our perspective? As I said, all of the state media have suddenly started telling the world about Digital China, but actually you can find our report online. We say it first, and we’re not the party, so hopefully we’re saying it neutrally and without bias.
This is an overall, national-level digital strategy, not technology strategy. It’s a digital strategy that drives all efforts within China, not – it’s – this is not just a industrial strategy. It is not just a technology sector strategy. This covers every area: political, economic, military, even foreign policy, and China’s place in the world.
And so why have we not heard about it and why was the Chinese press not writing about it in English until two days ago? We’re not sure. My colleague Dave and I think that there’s just – it’s just been quietly hidden in plain view. The fact is the Chinese media inside China has been educating the party, the people, and the population about the importance of this strategy for a number of years, and the last two or three years during COVID was a particularly intense education campaign – daily articles, journal pieces in party journals, and a lot of articles reflecting on decisions made at the standing committee level or the state council level and speeches by Xi Jinping.
The secrecy
So why has it been hidden? We’re not quite sure, but it’s now emerging. And so you’re – as journalists, you’re on the cutting edge, we think, of the second largest economy is suddenly announcing that it has this grand digital strategy. So we’re all rushing to find out what does it mean.
Why is it important – it’s just not another strategy? Xi Jinping has personally supported this strategy. The strategy name, Digital China or Building Digital China, has been around since 2012, but he actually has been thinking about this idea of data and the importance of data in government and in powering China as a great power. Since the 2000s when he was governor of Fujian province, he sort of co-opted an academics campaign called Digital Fujian. And so even to this day, you can see the connection, the intellectual line between Fujian and Digital China with Xi Jinping as its architect.
The strategy
The strategy has absolutely – as we say, it’s a digital strategy, but it’s also a deeply ideological strategy. And what do we mean by that? In essence, Xi Jinping views the arrival of the age of data – of course, we call it the new oil; some people call it the new oil – but he views it in a very Marxist historical, materialist lens, which means that he – like the steam engine essentially set the pattern and social structure of the Industrial Revolution and of capitalism, data is going to have that impact on society and create the sort of structure of society in a new way. And so Xi Jinping wants China to be ahead of that coming revolution, that coming data revolution. And for that reason, the party have gone so far as to rewrite Marxist economic theory, and data has now officially been made a factor of production. This has actually been revealed in English-language news, but what’s not known is that that was connected to this wider Digital China campaign.
So final two points and then we’re going to really open it back up to questions because we don’t want to talk too much at you. So, so far we’ve just been talking about strategy and the party design, top-level design meaning that it’s all-encompassing, but where’s the meat? Where’s the beef? What’s the actual reality of this strategy on the ground?
Well, the reality is that multiple provinces, state government, hundreds of agencies who are all budgeting, resourcing, and working in the name of Digital China, there is in fact a physical manifestation, an infrastructural manifestation of Digital China called New Type Infrastructure. It’s a way of realizing Digital China. So if you think of Digital China as the vision, and New Type Infrastructure is the sort of – a way of getting there. We’ll show you on the next page a sort of map of that. But $2.7 trillion over five years has been earmarked, so this is not an insignificant policy. And we argue it’s bigger than Belt and Road Initiative, it’s bigger than Silk Road, it’s bigger than Made in China 2025. It’s an all-encompassing, overall strategy that we’re just starting to learn the scale and scope.
And why is it a digital grand strategy? That’s our expression. The party doesn’t call it a grand strategy or digital grand strategy. We call it that because it’s all-encompassing, that it has foreign and domestic; it’s about changing China’s place in the international system to win the future and to compete more greatly with the Western powers and other powers. But it’s also about establishing, inside China, using all these digital infrastructures, these technologies – information highway, supercomputer network, satellite, industrial internet – to establish sort of control over data and a relationship between the citizens and the government that is, through the lens of Marxism, codified into data hierarchy and data usage.
So I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t sound very English. We’re struggling ourselves with how these party terms actually translate on the ground. If you look at this – a couple of books on the side that show you some – there’s some textbooks that have been put out there and some magazines that essentially talk about 2035 being the date when Digital China should be realized, and you also have sort of Digital China wins the future – it’s all about the competition.
If you look at this wonderful information graph that my colleague Dave created, which I think says a huge amount, you can see Digital China strategy is in the center, and he’s broken it down into an ends, ways, and means, with supporting and driving effects. It’s quite complex, but we really encourage you to look at this graph over time, perhaps not so much now but after the session. You can see just the drivers are about intelligent data and about the forces of production. That’s pushing things along. Supporting Digital China has been these other strategies, which you will have – you will have knowledge of: Cyber Great Power strategy, national big data strategy, military-civil fusion strategy. Those are all familiar for you. They support now the Digital China strategy, and as you can see, the means, ends, and ways – I won’t read out everything to you.
But yeah, it’s a somewhat flat system. There’s no hierarchy within the system. All of these things are sort of equal.
Questions
Some questions that we’ve asked ourself that we need to answer: How does the Marxist view of informatization and modernization count? How is Chinese – the Marxist theory on data and new essential principles on control manifest themselves inside – outside and inside China? In other words, is this a sort of revival of Marxist ideology in the international system? And how important is that to the international society? And then what is the design by which China seeks a digital order, or is it a new global order?
And again, we’re asking a question, number four, which is very common right now, which is the authoritarian aspect inherent in the smart society technology. So smart society is a subsequent step to Digital China.
New Type Infrastructure
We’ve spent the last 18 months thinking about this strategy inside China, inside the party. But we can tell you two things. One is we are writing two subsequent papers that look at – one is the New Type Infrastructure program, and how that interacts with the Belt and Road Initiative, which of course does have overseas and African connections; and secondly the relationship with Marxism, which – obviously Marxism is a revolutionary for-export ideology, so we’re very curious to pursue that line. We know it’s a little bit controversial. Most people dispel the idea that Marxism is a really driving ideology of China, but we believe that the facts indicate that, whether they believe it or not, they’re using the language of Marxism to structure this strategy.
So those are the two things we can tell you that, again, don’t address directly the information campaign taking out – simply to say that along with the digital age, along with the transfer of data, you’ve seen, I think, Xi Jinping really come to understand discourse power. And I know in – and this is not related to our paper, but I can chat with you offline – you have my email there, john@pacforum – that he views, like technology and the digital area, as sort of – this as a competition that China has to win. And so the party has to be in control of the mechanisms of information, including the Chinese state media. So again, you look at the five papers that all suddenly published the same article two days ago.
How it relates to Africa, of course, is that Africa is viewed strategically by the PRC as a market for its digital infrastructure and for its standards. It’s had a very tough going with U.S., obviously, because of the strategic competition. But even with Europe, it’s struggled to export a lot of its standards because of the closeness – (a) the closeness of the U.S. to Europe, but (b) also the values that it’s trying to push into these standards and technologies, which Europeans, generally speaking, are against.
