Xiang Xiaomei: Sustainably Deepen Reform to Promote the Deep Integrated Development of the "Real and the Digital" [1]
The Third Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee sounded the bugle call [1] for further comprehensively deepening reform, asserting that "high-quality development is the primary task in building a modern socialist country in all respects." It made specific deployments for "improving the institutions and mechanisms for developing new quality productive forces according to local conditions," and particularly for "improving the institutions for promoting the deep integration of the real economy and the digital economy." This provides a clear strategic orientation for cultivating and developing new quality productive forces and accelerating high-quality economic development on the New Journey [2]. Currently, digital technology has entered a period of accelerated innovative explosion and is deeply embedded in every link of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. It continuously empowers the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, gives birth to new industries, new business forms, and new models, and has become a strategic engine for China to seize the commanding heights of development, open up new tracks, shape new competitive advantages, and accumulate new momentum, demonstrating vast developmental potential. Therefore, continuously improving the institutions for the deep integration of the real economy and the digital economy—taking the deep integration of "the real and the digital" as the main thread to accelerate the development of new quality productive forces—will inject a continuous and powerful impetus into the advancement of Chinese-path modernization.
Promoting the Integrated Development of "the Real and the Digital" through Reform
The Third Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee highlighted that the real economy is the foundation and lifeblood of the national economy. It emphasized that the digital economy must empower the real economy to achieve "strengthening the real through the digital" rather than "shifting from the real to the virtual" [3]. The integrated development of "the real and the digital" is not a blind, superficial, or mechanical transformation of digital applications. Rather, it takes digital knowledge and information as key productive factors and uses a new generation of digital technologies—such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the Internet of Things—as core driving forces. It permeates, leads, and profoundly changes the development models and growth logic of the real economy, achieving resource optimization on a broader scale, a deeper transformation of production methods, and a higher level of value creation, thereby tangibly improving the autonomous innovation capabilities and international competitiveness of the real economy. The benign interaction, complementarity, and mutual promotion between the real economy and the digital economy are conducive to cultivating and strengthening new quality productive forces.
From the perspective of global trends, digital technology and the digital economy represent the vanguard of the world’s scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation. The digital economy is characterized by high innovation, strong permeability, and broad coverage. Its speed of development, range of radiation, and depth of influence are unprecedented, driving major changes in modes of production, lifestyles, and ways of thinking. It has profoundly reshaped the global economic map and the international balance of power, becoming a key force in the development of productive forces. Facing new trends in the technological revolution and industrial transformation, we must place the promotion of the deep integration of the real and digital economies in an important strategic position. We must empower the construction of a modern industrial system with the digital economy to achieve "changing lanes to overtake" [4] and "switching tracks to lead," winning the initiative for future development.
From the perspective of current reality, the development of China’s digital economy has increased in both quantity and quality, and the digital transformation of traditional industries is advancing in depth. New industries, new models, and new business forms have become important forces for national economic growth. At the same time, certain weak links still restrict the process of integrated "real and digital" development in China. Promoting this deep integration requires not only innovation at the level of technology and business models but, more importantly, transformation at the level of management and institutions. This requires stimulating all-around vitality in technological, industrial, managerial, and model innovation, releasing the magnifying, overlapping, and multiplying effects of data as a factor of production. We must promote the accelerated emergence of new quality productive forces with strategic emerging industries and future industries as their core carriers, pushing high-quality development to a new level.
An Important Handle for Developing New Quality Productive Forces
The integration of "the real and the digital" opens new paths for promoting breakthrough scientific and technological innovation. In terms of improving research efficiency, digital technologies such as big data, AI, virtual mapping, and high-precision simulation are deeply embedded in the research and development, pilot testing, and transformation of achievements within the real economy. This effectively improves traditional innovation process management and significantly reduces search costs, R&D cycles, and the uncertainty risks of scientific innovation. In terms of expanding the breadth of knowledge, this integration breaks down boundary barriers between technologies, promoting the efficient diffusion of technical knowledge in codifiable forms across industrial chains, and broadening the spatial and temporal boundaries of knowledge spillovers and emerging technology applications. In terms of deepening collaborative innovation, digital platforms stimulate the establishment of broader and tighter interactive collaborative innovation ecology chains. Based on data chains, we can connect the innovation, industrial, capital, and talent chains, achieving the cross-regional and cross-industry sharing of innovation resources, effectively solving problems such as insufficient computing power, technical silos, and a lack of application scenarios. The integrated innovation capabilities formed by cross-border technological fusion will also allow more original and disruptive scientific innovation achievements to fully emerge.
The integration of "the real and the digital" injects new momentum into the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries. From the supply side, digital technology accelerates the digital, intelligent, and green transformation of traditional industries. The wide application of digital-intelligent and green technologies carries out technical transformation and upgrading, driving equipment renewal, process upgrades, product innovation, service upgrades, and lean management, leading to a leap in total factor productivity. From the demand side, traditional industries can use digital technology to gain more flexible, efficient, and precise insights into market demand, discovering potential market opportunities and innovation points to form precisely matched production-and-marketing networks that meet the increasing diversified and high-quality demands of consumers. The integration of "the real and the digital" will bring all-around, multi-angled, and full-chain changes to traditional industries, continuously increasing their "newness," "greenness," and "value" [5], making them important representatives for the development of new quality productive forces.
The integration of "the real and the digital" creates a new engine for promoting cross-border industrial cooperation. This integration drives a profound "fusion revolution" between industries, injecting new vitality into the organic linkage and cross-border cooperation of multi-dimensional industries on a larger scale and at a deeper level. This industrial fusion expands the boundaries of the traditional economy and promotes the reshaping of industrial forms. In particular, new models such as the sharing economy, platform economy, cloud manufacturing, and cross-border e-commerce are constantly emerging. New business forms like smart agriculture, smart logistics, smart healthcare, and online education are flourishing. Strategic emerging industries and future industries—such as next-generation information technology, humanoid robots, quantum information, blockchain, biotechnology, and the low-altitude economy—have emerged as the times require. They have already shown great development potential and have become important carriers of new quality productive forces and key drivers of future economic growth.
Improving the Policy System for the Deep Integration of "the Real and the Digital"
First, focus on improving the policy system that leads digital technology innovation. Achieving the leap from "following" to "leading" in digital technology is not only the key to stimulating more disruptive scientific innovation results but also the solid foundation for China to grasp the initiative in development and achieve high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and self-strengthening. Therefore, we must leverage the advantages of the new-type whole-nation system [6], strengthen the layout of strategic scientific and technological forces in the digital field, scientifically coordinate and concentrate resources to meticulously deploy and implement a number of major scientific and technological projects, and focus on overcoming "bottleneck" [7] problems in original and leading digital technologies. We must highlight strategic, holistic, and forward-looking basic research, focusing on frontier fields such as high-end chips, industrial software, quantum computing, blockchain algorithms, and digital twins, to create more "hard-core technologies" that lead the development of new quality productive forces. We should coordinately advance the integrated reform of the institutions and mechanisms for education, science and technology, and talent; improve the mechanisms for talent introduction, cultivation, use, and evaluation; and cultivate more strategic scientists, first-class technological leaders, and other scientific talents, as well as information engineers, data analysts, and digital craftsmen, to provide intellectual support for the integrated development of the real and digital economies.
Second, focus on improving the policy system that promotes digital industrialization and industrial digitalization. These are the important directions for the integration of the real and the digital. Therefore, we should establish and improve policies that encourage the "intelligent transformation, digital turning, and networked connection" of the manufacturing industry. We must deeply carry out special actions to empower small and medium-sized enterprises digitally, creating more flexible production lines, digital workshops, and intelligent manufacturing factories, aiming for the wide application of 5G, the deep empowerment of AI, full data driving, and a secure and controllable Industrial Internet. We should issue action plans to guide enterprises in "AI Plus" initiatives, promoting the cross-border fusion of existing business forms with digital forms, and opening up new fields, chains, and tracks in emerging and future industries such as brain-like intelligence, quantum information, genetic technology, and deep-sea/aerospace exploration, while continuously enriching and expanding the application scenarios of real-digital integration.
Third, focus on improving the policy system for the marketization of data factors. Data is a high-quality productive factor for forming new quality productive forces. Therefore, we should coordinately advance key projects such as "East Data, West Computing" [8] and "Land Data, Sea Computing," along with the deployment and construction of digital computing infrastructure like 5G and the Industrial Internet, to accelerate the formation of a national integrated computing system and provide inclusive, efficient, and flexible computing service supplies. We must actively promote the development, opening, circulation, and use of data, build high-level big data trading centers, explore more data application scenarios, and break down information silos and data divides to achieve the interconnection and orderly flow of data across multiple industries and sectors. We must improve the rules and services for trading data factors, enhance the level of supervision over such transactions, and focus on solving problems like "difficulty in determining rights," "difficulty in use," "difficulty in sharing," and "difficulty in trading" during the processes of data aggregation, processing, circulation, and exchange, thereby maximizing the excavation and release of data value and potential.
Fourth, focus on improving the policy system that guarantees the integrated development of the real and digital economies. To develop new quality productive forces, we must form a new type of relations of production that corresponds to them. We should deepen the reform of the financial system, guide financial institutions to optimize products and services, and support the construction of digital technology and industrial funds to form a benign cycle with effective connections between "technology, industry, and finance." We should promote the construction of a unified national market and a high-standard market system, and improve the governance system for real-digital integration, including social credit, property rights protection, competition rules, market supervision, and safety evaluation. This will break down regional barriers and market fragmentation, creating a market environment of fair competition and a stable, predictable business environment. We must continue to promote high-level opening up to the outside world, actively participate in the formulation of technical standards and rules in the global digital field, deepen international exchange and cooperation mechanisms in digital innovation and digital trade, and expand the space for developing new quality productive forces. Finally, we must improve data privacy protection and security review systems, formulate network and data security standards and norms, and strengthen the protection of government data, corporate commercial secrets, and personal data, using a high level of digital security to escort the deep integrated development of "the real and the digital."
(The author is the Vice President and Researcher of the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences, and a special researcher at the Guangdong Center for the Study of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.)
Source: Guangming Daily (January 27, 2025) Web Editor: Huihui