Yang Jing: Practical Paths for Promoting Common Prosperity in the Digital Age
Chinese-path modernization is the socialist modernization of common prosperity for all people. The recommendations for the "15th Five-Year Plan" [1] emphasize "taking solid steps toward promoting common prosperity for all," which serves as an overarching requirement guiding economic and social development during this period. At present and for the foreseeable future, promoting common prosperity for all faces profound influences brought about by a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation. How to better transform the digital dividend into a tangible sense of fulfillment and happiness [2] for the masses is a practical challenge that must be answered to promote common prosperity in the digital age. This requires us to identify the practical paths for solidly promoting common prosperity for all in the digital age, based on a profound grasp of its rich connotations.
Planning Based on the Overall Situation
General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "Common prosperity for all is a holistic concept that applies to the entire society. We should not divide it into urban and rural parts, or into Eastern, Central, and Western regions, and set separate indicators for each; it must be viewed from the overall situation." This important assertion profoundly reveals the holistic characteristics of common prosperity for all. As common prosperity involves political, economic, cultural, and social aspects, we must adhere to a systems concept and plan based on the overall situation. We must focus on problems such as unbalanced regional development, employment difficulties for certain groups, and the need to further expand the middle-income group, while coordinating the development of all regions, fields, and links. While seizing opportunities in the digital age, we must start from overall planning to systematically prevent and resolve risks and challenges such as structural unemployment, widening distribution gaps, and inequality of opportunity that may be brought about by digital-intelligent development. We must dynamically embed the goal of common prosperity for all into the medium- and long-term development planning and regional evaluation systems of various localities, utilizing big data calculations and large-model simulations to improve the accuracy of trend judgments, enhance policy evaluation capabilities, and strengthen the foresight, systematic nature, and regional coordination of planning.
Common prosperity for all means prosperity in both the material and spiritual lives of the masses. In the Explanation on the "Recommendations of the CPC Central Committee for Formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development," General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: "With a focus on promoting common prosperity in the spiritual life of the people, we propose to promote and practice the Core Socialist Values, vigorously flourish cultural undertakings, accelerate the development of cultural industries, and enhance the communication and influence of Chinese civilization." This important discourse profoundly demonstrates that promoting common prosperity must place cultural construction in a prominent position, achieving the organic unity of material and spiritual civilization at a higher level. We must accelerate the digital-intelligent transformation of cultural industries, increase the digital-intelligent supply of public cultural services, and promote the direct delivery of high-quality cultural resources to the grassroots. By using digital-intelligent technology to narrow the cultural service gap, we can better flourish and develop socialist culture, promoting both the common prosperity of the people's spiritual life and well-rounded human development.
Adhering to Overall Coordination
General Secretary Xi Jinping noted: "Our common prosperity is about better meeting the people's needs for a better life, gradually achieving overall and universal prosperity. It adheres to the combination of the market and the government, and the unity of efficiency and fairness. We must bake a bigger cake while dividing it well, creating an olive-shaped distribution structure." This discourse reveals that promoting common prosperity requires the coordinated handling of several major relationships, three of which are particularly important in the digital age.
First, handling the relationship between the government and the market. Promoting common prosperity requires the organic combination of an effective market and a proactive government. We must accelerate the construction of a high-level socialist market economy, promote the deep integration of the real economy and the digital economy, give full play to the decisive role of the market in resource allocation, and promote the optimal combination of factors such as data, technology, capital, and labor. Simultaneously, we must better leverage the role of the government, focusing on solving market failure issues that may arise from the development of the digital economy, strengthening supervision and guidance, enhancing digital governance, and preventing platform monopolies and the disorderly expansion of capital.
Second, handling the relationship between efficiency and fairness. While digital-intelligent technology empowers industrial upgrading and promotes production efficiency, it also brings problems such as algorithmic discrimination and the digital divide, which may trigger social inequality. We must combine efficiency with fairness throughout the entire process of digital-intelligent transformation. By improving algorithmic governance rules, strengthening platform supervision, and refining digital infrastructure construction, we can embed fairness of opportunity, rules, and markets into new industries and business forms, promoting social fairness and justice while enhancing efficiency.
Third, handling the relationship between production and distribution. On one hand, we must consolidate the material foundation for common prosperity in the pursuit of high-quality development, especially by more fully transforming data, computing power, and algorithms into the driving force for the development of productive forces. On the other hand, the distribution system is the foundational institution for promoting common prosperity. We must persist with distribution according to work as the mainstay while allowing multiple forms of distribution to coexist, promoting the construction of a coordinated institutional system of primary distribution, redistribution, and third-party distribution [3]. In response to changes in the income distribution order and wealth accumulation mechanisms brought by the rapid development of new industries and formats, we should emphasize improving institutional norms regarding labor remuneration. We must continuously refine mechanisms for wage determination, reasonable growth, and payment guarantees to promote the reasonable growth of worker compensation. This will help increase the share of resident income in national income distribution and the share of labor remuneration in primary distribution, enhancing the stability of resident income growth.
Focusing on Key Breakthroughs
Improving people's well-being is the essential requirement for achieving common prosperity and embodying social fairness and justice. During the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, livelihood work is being placed in an even more prominent position. General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized: "We must persist in ensuring and improving people's livelihoods during development, doing more practical things that follow the people's will, benefit their lives, and warm their hearts, so as to continuously meet the aspirations of people of all ethnic groups for a better life." Facing the changes brought by the digital age, we must place greater emphasis on the leading role of digital-intelligent technology in ensuring and improving livelihoods.
Efforts should be focused on promoting high-quality and full employment. We must strengthen dynamic monitoring and analytical assessment, moving risk identification and policy guidance forward to timely counter the structural employment shocks that may be triggered by the widespread application of new technologies. We should build digital-intelligent employment service platforms, improve the lifelong vocational skill training system, and strengthen training in digital-intelligent technology and general skills. By relying on digital-intelligent platforms to enhance job matching, retraining, and employment service supply, we can improve the ability of workers to adapt to new positions.
We must also strengthen the protection of workers' rights and interests. While new industries and formats innovate employment models, they also bring issues such as blurred labor relations, extended working hours, and fragmented employment responsibilities. We must strengthen the construction of the system for protecting the rights and interests of workers in new forms of employment, improving the identification of labor relations, guarantees for rest and leisure, and protection against occupational injuries. We should refine collaborative mechanisms for the prevention, resolution, and supervision of labor disputes to ensure that protection measures for workers' rights are effectively implemented.
Furthermore, we must promote the expansion and quality improvement of social security. By fully utilizing digital-intelligent technology, we should focus on implementing special expansion actions for groups such as flexible employees and workers in new forms of employment, improving capabilities for precise identification and dynamic management. We should accelerate the application of digital-intelligent technology in the field of social security to improve the quality and efficiency of administrative services, making it more convenient for flexible and new-employment groups to participate in insurance and enjoy benefits, thereby weaving a dense and secure social safety net for people's livelihoods.
Accelerating Policy Implementation
As digital-intelligent technology becomes deeply embedded in all aspects of economic and social operation, livelihood governance not only needs to respond to new requirements for timeliness, precision, and efficiency but also faces new challenges such as cross-field coordination, cross-departmental collaboration, and online-offline synergy. It is necessary to further strengthen policy alignment to achieve integrated protection for life-cycle needs—including childbirth, childcare, education, employment, housing, social security, medical care, and elderly care—and continuously improve the basic public service system. Through policy support, we should guide social forces to participate in the supply of public services, forming a diversified supply pattern characterized by government leadership, market operation, and social collaboration.
First, with the goal of equalizing basic public services, we should improve the quality of public services through digitalization in key areas such as childcare, education, medical care, and elderly care. We must promote the downward extension of resources and online collaboration in the livelihood sector, accelerate the development of "age-appropriate" digital technology, and promote the immediate and transparent supply of basic public services, enhancing the accessibility of public services in a digital-intelligent context.
Second, we must strengthen the integrated management of livelihood services, break down departmental data barriers, and establish cross-departmental collaborative mechanisms for livelihood business. We should use digital-intelligent technology to enhance the quality of service supply, policy evaluation, and governance efficacy, establishing an integrated governance mechanism driven by data, involving multiple participants, and managed dynamically to effectively improve the level of public services.
Third, we must enhance the interconnectedness and interactivity of digital-intelligent transformation in fields such as income distribution, public services, and social governance. We should accelerate the construction of a whole-process digital management platform, promote the digitalization of policy objectives, process monitoring, and effect evaluation, and leverage the advantages of digital governance to better promote common prosperity.