Tian Kan: Digital Finance Empowering the Development of New Quality Productive Forces
Tian Kan
New quality productive forces [1] are a significant manifestation of the modernizing transformation of productive forces within the process of Chinese-path modernization. They represent a contemporary expression of the Sinicization of Marxist productive force theory and constitute a major innovation aligned with the current development landscape.
In summarizing the past year's development, the 2024 Central Economic Work Conference [2] explicitly pointed out that new quality productive forces are developing steadily. In deploying key tasks for 2025, the Conference emphasized leading the development of new quality productive forces through scientific and technological innovation to build a modern industrial system. Furthermore, in analyzing the regularities of economic work [3], the Conference proposed that we must balance the relationship between fostering new kinetic energy and updating old kinetic energy, developing new quality productive forces according to local conditions.
As an emerging financial format resulting from the organic integration of advanced digital technology and traditional financial services, digital finance possesses unique advantages in reshaping financial service models, expanding service boundaries, and enhancing service efficiency. Relying on digital technology, modern information technology, and artificial intelligence, digital finance accurately matches the capital requirements of scientific and technological innovation subjects, realizing the digital supply and innovation of financial products and services. Digital finance promotes the development of new quality productive forces by optimizing factor allocation, driving technological innovation, and promoting industrial upgrading.
Establish a full-process service mechanism for digital finance to overcome technical bottlenecks in new quality productive forces. New quality productive forces are characterized by high degrees of innovation, complexity, and uncertainty. Realizing disruptive original innovations and breakthroughs in key core technologies, as well as transforming and applying scientific and technological achievements, is fraught with difficulties—capital being the most prominent issue. The full-process service mechanism created by digital finance can accurately serve the key nodes of new quality productive forces development, solving project capital requirements for basic research in digital technology and attacks on core technologies, thereby alleviating financing difficulties. It precisely matches key factors such as capital, technology, and talent, providing data support and reducing economic losses caused by resource misallocation.
In the initial stages of frontier technology exploration and key technology research, enterprises involved in new quality productive forces may face capital shortages and a lack of direction. By leveraging analysis models built on big data and AI, digital finance institutions can deeply analyze massive amounts of technological information and market trends to screen out projects that align with the trends of new quality productive forces and possess high application potential. This provides enterprises with a clear direction for technological innovation and inspiration for technical breakthroughs. The timely injection of seed capital, venture capital, and credit support resolves funding issues, allowing the R&D of new technologies to launch smoothly and consolidating the technical foundation of new quality productive forces.
During the transition of technological achievements from the laboratory to the market, challenges such as obstructed commercialization channels frequently exist. Digital finance introduces data asset pledge models, transforming intangible assets such as technical patents and scientific research achievements into pledgeable assets. This helps new technologies and models enter the market rapidly, spawning new industries and business models, and continuously broadening the boundaries of new quality productive forces to ensure their sustained extension along the dimension of innovation, demonstrating vigorous vitality. Simultaneously, the establishment of digital matching platforms efficiently connects enterprises, investors, and upstream/downstream partners, accelerating the industrialization of achievements and clearing the "blockages" [4] in the commercialization of new quality productive forces.
When new products and technologies enter the market, precise positioning and brand marketing are critical. Digital finance platforms utilize their data insight advantages to analyze consumer preferences and market competition landscapes, assisting enterprises in finding accurate product positioning. By providing marketing strategies, brand-building plans, and customer relationship management techniques, they enable enterprises to rapidly build brand awareness, expand market share, and promote the widespread application of results from new quality productive forces.
Construct an integration mechanism for the digital finance ecological chain to promote industrial synergy in new quality productive forces. Digital finance develops in coordination with strategic emerging industries and future industries, empowering deep collaborative cooperation across industries and domains for new quality productive forces. The ecological chain integration mechanism of digital finance weaves an interconnected and efficient industrial development network, achieving the coordinated optimization of capital, information, and logistics flows. By providing synergistic support to the upstream and downstream of the entire industrial chain, it improves resource allocation efficiency, enabling each node within the chain to realize higher value-added.
The digital finance ecosystem utilizes frontier technologies such as blockchain and cloud computing to aggregate and integrate financial resources, industrial dynamics, and market supply-and-demand information. It realizes encrypted storage and real-time synchronization of industrial chain data, constructing a transparent data platform with multi-stakeholder participation. This breaks "information silos" and barriers to resource circulation, reducing transaction friction and trust costs. It allows capital to flow precisely into potential enterprises in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, activating innovation "cells," realizing cross-sector cooperation among different industrial subjects, overcoming common technical problems, and accelerating the iterative upgrading of new quality productive forces.
Financial institutions can join forces with upstream and downstream enterprises, universities, and research institutes to carry out deep integration of industry, academia, and research centered on the developmental needs of new quality productive forces. They can jointly tackle technical bottlenecks, such as battery life for new energy vehicles and R&D hurdles in biomedicine, giving rise to new technologies, business formats, and products. Through knowledge sharing and technology diffusion effects, different industries are encouraged to learn from each other's strengths, reshaping the industrial ecosystem and injecting strong impetus into the development of new quality productive forces.
Digital finance encourages universities, research institutions, and enterprises to establish long-term, stable cooperative relationships to achieve the co-cultivation of talent, joint research on technology, and sharing of results. The government provides support at the policy level, absorbing international advanced technology and management experience and improving the intellectual property protection system. This creates a favorable cooperative ecosystem for the development of new quality productive forces, attracting the aggregation of more innovative factors.
Create a mechanism for releasing the value of digital finance data to drive the upgrading of factors of new quality productive forces. Data is a key factor of production in the financial industry. Fostering new quality productive forces requires strengthening the governance of digital finance factors, effectively releasing the resource allocation and application functions of digital finance data. This helps factors break through old states and achieve upgrades across dimensions such as technology, production, labor, and markets.
Digital finance platforms broadly incorporate data from internal enterprise production and R&D, as well as external markets and industries. They use standardized processes to merge various types of data, forming complete datasets that eliminate "information silos" and build a solid foundation for the accurate assessment of new quality productive forces factors, avoiding the biased perceptions caused by data fragmentation.
With the help of data analysis technology, key information closely linked to factors is extracted from massive datasets. By analyzing technical data to clarify innovation directions, interpreting market data to grasp demand trends, and analyzing talent data to gain insights into labor efficiency, digital finance provides precise guidance for formulating factor-upgrading strategies and uncovers the driving forces for factor upgrades hidden within the data.
By enriching multi-dimensional data application scenarios and following the results of data value mining, digital finance offers customized services. These include: providing R&D subsidies and risk-sharing for technical factors; providing capital for equipment upgrades and process optimization for production factors; building talent cultivation linkage mechanisms to help talent factors improve skills; and providing expansion support and marketing assistance for market factors.
Improve the digital finance financing credit enhancement mechanism to optimize the market soil for new quality productive forces. The digital finance financing credit enhancement mechanism integrates frontier technologies and innovative financial tools. By utilizing diversified credit enhancement methods and the power of regulatory technology (RegTech), it comprehensively optimizes the market soil for new quality productive forces, enabling them to achieve high-quality development within an environment of sufficient capital security and good credit.
Digital finance abandons the traditional model of evaluation based on single financial indicators. It integrates big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain technology to comprehensively consider factors such as enterprise operational data, market competitiveness, and intellectual property valuation, sketching a precise credit profile for enterprises. Financial institutions use this to accurately identify the credit status and development potential of new quality productive forces enterprises, providing sufficient and adapted financing quotas and plans, ensuring that capital flows smoothly into potential enterprises.
Innovatively introducing diversified credit enhancement tools such as credit insurance, guarantee funds, and risk compensation reduces the credit risk of financial institutions. The government, financial institutions, and enterprises should work together to build risk-sharing mechanisms, allowing credit funds to surge into industries such as new energy and high-end equipment manufacturing, alleviating the "difficult and expensive financing" dilemma for enterprises and stimulating the enthusiasm of market entities to invest in the construction of new quality productive forces.
Using RegTech, digital finance monitors market dynamics and changes in enterprise credit in real-time, providing accurate early warnings for potential risks and guiding financial institutions to adjust credit policies according to risk conditions, maintaining the stability of the capital chain. It strictly upholds the bottom line against systemic risks, ensures market stability and order, and creates a safe and stable financing environment for the development of new quality productive forces.
Innovate the digital finance inclusive service mechanism to stimulate the subjective momentum of new quality productive forces. The digital finance inclusive service mechanism uses frontier technologies to break through the limitations of time and space, expanding the scope of service and attracting numerous subjects to participate. Based on the differentiated needs of subjects, it customizes exclusive financial plans, builds demand-supply matching channels, and optimizes services in real-time to ensure alignment with the development of new quality productive forces. By comprehensively stimulating the momentum of market entities, digital finance injects strong power into new quality productive forces.
Talent is not only the source of innovation but also the key force driving industrial upgrading and technological breakthroughs. With the help of big data, cloud computing, and mobile internet technologies, digital finance breaks through regional and temporal constraints, realizing seamless connection between online and offline services. By establishing financial service stations in rural and remote areas and promoting mobile payments and micro-credit, it broadens the coverage radius of financial services, absorbing groups such as micro and small enterprises, farmers, and individual entrepreneurs into the construction of new quality productive forces, thereby strengthening the developmental forces.
Digital finance should closely follow the differentiated needs of market entities, customizing large-scale financing and M&A restructuring plans for leading enterprises. For "specialized, refined, differential, and innovative" [5] SMEs, it should create intellectual property pledge loans and scientific innovation funds. By introducing intelligent service processes to simplify procedures and reduce costs, it improves the accuracy and cost-effectiveness of financial services, allowing enterprises to focus on the innovative development of new quality productive forces without distraction.
Digital finance institutions should work with the government and enterprises to customize special financial support policies, providing policy guidance and support for market entities participating in the development of new quality productive forces. By building two-way feedback channels, they can collect the demands of market entities in real-time and dynamically optimize the content and form of financial services, ensuring that services closely align with the developmental needs of new quality productive forces.
(The author is a researcher at the National Academy of Economic Strategy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Source: Chinese Social Sciences Net / China Social Sciences Today Web Editor: Huihui