Zhang Shuhui, Wang Zhenyu, and Zhang Runze: Empowering the Development of New Quality Productive Forces through Intelligent Decision-Making

New quality productive forces represent an advanced state of productive forces that break away from traditional development paths. Their cultivation, development, and strengthening call for a leapfrog in national decision-making capacity. As a fundamental capability oriented toward all-domain factors, national decision-making capacity determines whether leaders and managers can conduct in-depth analysis, scientific judgment, rational planning, and rapid response to various issues within complex and volatile environments to formulate optimal courses of action. It plays a pivotal role in grasping the overall situation, optimizing resource allocation, promoting scientific and technological innovation, and driving industrial transformation; it is an essential foundation for the development of new quality productive forces. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized the need to accelerate the construction of "intelligent and integrated digital information infrastructure." The enhancement of national decision-making capacity cannot be decoupled from the adaptation of infrastructure. Digitalized and intelligent national decision-making infrastructure is precisely the innovative public technical base that facilitates the leap in national decision-making capacity and serves as a powerful lever for developing new quality productive forces.

The Development of New Quality Productive Forces Requires Empowerment via High-Quality Intelligent Decision-Making

Since 2023, the theoretical connotations of new quality productive forces have become increasingly clear, and their strategic importance has continued to rise. The intellectualization, agilization, and digitalization of national decision-making capacity have become inherent requirements of this concept. During the 11th collective study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized the prominent characteristics of "high technology, high efficiency, and high quality" inherent in new quality productive forces. High-quality intelligent decision-making is an important lever for cultivating innovative momentum and promoting the synergistic leap of the relations of production and the productive forces. Currently, the cultivation and development of new quality productive forces require both the writing of the "great essay" ^[1] of leading development through holistic and strategic high-quality decisions, and the creation of a "multiplier" where digital-intelligent and agile decision-making drives disruptive innovation.

New quality productive forces are rooted in the optimized integration of production factors such as labor, knowledge, technology, management, capital, and data; they emerge from the virtuous cycle of education, science and technology, and talent. Their cultivation especially relies on high-quality decision-making. For the government, high-quality strategic decision-making is an inevitable link in effectively coordinating security and development. Against the backdrop of intensified international competition and increasing global uncertainties, decision-makers must base themselves on the "two overall situations" ^[2] and formulate policies that conform to the country's long-term developmental interests. For enterprises, high-quality economic decision-making is a prerequisite for improving total factor productivity. Based on deep insights into new technologies, new industries, new formats, and new models, decision-makers must match advantageous "tracks" with capital investment to accelerate the integrated creation of laborers, instruments of labor, and subjects of labor. For universities and research institutions, achieving high-quality scientific and educational decision-making is an important cornerstone of innovation-driven development. As the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation evolves rapidly, decision-makers must focus on national strategies and the practical needs of talent growth to innovate talent cultivation, optimize disciplinary structures, and forge the "new force" ^[3] for high-quality development.

The continuous enhancement of new quality productive forces requires the support of intelligent decision-making driven by hybrid intelligence to construct new models for mitigating risks and responding to challenges. New quality productive forces are inherently transformative and disruptive, coupling with the new chapters of the era—the digital economy, digital society, and digital governance. Their developmental momentum stems from achieving agile tracking of real-world changes, penetrating assessment of complex problems, and precise analysis of high-frequency risks. Driven by practical needs and the intelligent revolution, the traditional decision-making model—where human intelligence performs the primary work—is gradually integrating deeply with artificial intelligence, which utilizes various algorithmic models for situational awareness, predictive forecasting, and countermeasure simulation. This hybrid intelligence-driven model can analyze dynamic, high-dimensional big data in real-time and achieve intelligent optimization through self-learning and human-computer interaction. By continuously improving the scientific rigor, precision, effectiveness, and adaptability of decisions, the intelligent transformation of decision-making capacity will provide strong momentum for the development of new quality productive forces.

The Level of National Decision-Making Infrastructure Determines National Decision-Making Capacity

Facing the new coordinates of new quality productive forces, high-quality decision-making is the "key engine" for converging diverse momentums. High-quality decision-making aims for timely and comprehensive information collection, accurate and scientific application of theory, and agile and effective implementation of countermeasures. It covers systemic goal-setting, all-domain information integration, forward-looking trend prediction, and practical countermeasure suggestions. Promoting the leapfrog development of national decision-making capacity must be grounded in the reinforcement of national decision-making infrastructure. The fundamental definition of national decision-making infrastructure lies in the key technical facilities and organizations used by the state in its strategic actions to collect information, design countermeasures, and evaluate choices. This includes technical entities such as various knowledge databases, algorithmic model libraries, and computing centers, as well as research institutions like think tanks and universities that provide intellectual support for national decision-making. The data quality, technical level, knowledge endowment, and systemic form of national decision-making infrastructure collectively determine the quality and efficiency of national decisions.

National decision-making infrastructure constitutes the "searchlight" of national decision-making. With the rising waves of networking, informatization, and digitalization, the physical world can be represented by various forms of data. "Data is the lifeblood of decision-making." As the resource base of national decision-making infrastructure, the abundance and integrity of databases directly determine the quality of national digital resources. Multi-source, heterogeneous, and synchronous "big data" transcends the limitations of "small data" and can provide real-time evidence for various decisions in economy, society, technology, and education. This externalizes into the state's systemic capacity to acquire and apply information, promoting the effective enhancement of national decision-making capacity. Utilizing the construction and development of national decision-making infrastructure to improve the functional operation modes of data acquisition, mining, storage, and calculation—thereby opening the "data–information–knowledge" decision-support pathway—is a crucial measure to sharpen the "front-view mirror" of national decision-making.

National decision-making infrastructure constitutes the "engine" of national decision-making. In the digital era, where systemic effects are unprecedentedly enhanced, even the possession of massive information will result in a loss of relative competitive advantage if high-quality decisions cannot be formed rapidly. The agility and precision of decision-making rely on the efficient collaboration between expert intelligence and machine intelligence—that is, through the deep integration of technology and computing resources with intellectual and organizational resources to achieve scientific planning of complex tasks, comprehensive collection of necessary data, precise answering of key questions, and efficient output of countermeasure schemes. In the digital era, algorithmic model libraries are the key modules for national decision-making infrastructure to "gather pearls from the sea of data." From automated expert models that use chains of thought to pre-embed knowledge and rules, to deep learning models that "learn" patterns and regularities from massive historical data, the dual-wheel drive of theoretical research and model innovation makes the "engine" of national decision-making powerful and robust.

Advancing National Decision-Making Infrastructure to Drive the Leapfrog Development of China's Decision-Making Capacity

Currently, the leapfrog development of national decision-making capacity faces unprecedented historical opportunities; the timing is right to construct national decision-making infrastructure. The 2024 Government Work Report emphasized the need to "appropriately advance the construction of digital infrastructure." The core of new quality productive forces is "innovation," and intelligent, integrated national decision-making infrastructure is precisely the new driver for the leapfrog development of national decision-making capacity.

In terms of technical conditions, the "disruptive" development of national decision-making infrastructure is well-timed. Frontier information technologies represented by AI and big data are developing rapidly, machine learning algorithms have made breakthrough progress, and the "sudden emergence" of large language models signals that the Fourth Industrial Revolution has arrived. Driven by the intelligent revolution, full-volume and all-domain data factors provide national decision-making with all-round, multi-angle, and full-chain information support. The continuous superposition of computing materials and algorithms, coordinated with the rise of emerging interdisciplinary fields like computational social science, provides a basis for achieving scientific, complex, and precise decision-making. The closed decision-making paradigm, which relied primarily on expert knowledge and established rules, has receded; a smart decision-making paradigm based on "hybrid intelligence" and "simulation" is gradually becoming possible. Driven by large language models and multi-agent systems, the real-time collection and processing of high-dimensional big data, the operation and optimization of algorithmic models, the construction of chains of thought for expert decision analysis, and the high-fidelity simulation of social actors provide complete technical conditions for the realization of intelligent decision-making in various fields of national and social development. Strengthening the construction of national decision-making infrastructure will inevitably drive the intelligent transformation of the entire process, all fields, and the full chain of national decision-making.

Overall, China has already established a certain foundation for the large-scale construction and systematic operation of national decision-making infrastructure. The management of data and models by government decision-making departments has become institutionalized; the capacity of national high-end think tanks to serve decisions on strategic and holistic issues has continuously improved; and various open integrated scientific research platforms vigorously built by universities and research institutes also provide a scientific foundation for national decision-making infrastructure. Under the synergistic advantages of multiple stakeholders, national decision-making infrastructure can, directed at important issues in various fields of national and social development, accelerate the construction of national condition information platforms for holistic, normalized, and real-time data investigation and collection. It can gradually establish algorithmic model platforms with clear decision variables and theoretical foundations, and categorize the construction of intelligent application systems containing scenario-based problems and countermeasure cases. This will lead the way in building a national decision-making infrastructure system adapted to the development of new quality productive forces, helping national decision-making capacity achieve a leapfrog enhancement.

(The authors are respectively: Vice President of the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Director of the Laboratory of Digital Civilization and Intelligent Decision-Making; Researcher at the Laboratory of Digital Civilization and Intelligent Decision-Making, University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Secretary-General of the Laboratory of Digital Civilization and Intelligent Decision-Making, University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

Source: Chinese Social Sciences Net – Guangming Daily Web Editor: Hui Hui