苏剑：数字经济与实体经济融合发展将助推我国“换道超车” - 2021-04-23

Su Jian

The Two Sessions 2021 was held at an important time when the 13th Five-Year Plan were successfully implemented, and the new journey of building a modern socialist country in an all-round way kicked off. During the Two Sessions, “promoting digital and intelligent transformation of industries, and maintaining the momentum of rapid development of strategic emerging industries”, “actively using digital technology to promote rural revitalization and shared development”, “making strategic deployments in key digital technological innovations, and seizing commanding heights of future competition,” were important topics discussed by the delegates and committee members.
It has become a consensus for the industry and society that we should seize the moment to develop digital economy. Recently, the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University released a report titled Research on the Development Path to Promote Deep Integration of Digital Economy and Real Economy during the 14th Five-Year Plan Period. It gives a comprehensive analysis of the current situation, strengths and weaknesses of China’s digital economy. It suggests that we should seize the opportunity of the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, and take the deep integration of digital economy and real economy as an important path to consolidate the foundation of real economy and achieve high-quality development.
China is a highland for digitization worldwide. As of 2020, its Internet penetration rate had reached 70.4%, with the number of Internet users and mobile payment users hitting 989 million and 850 million respectively. According to the White Paper on Digital Economy Development in China (2020) issued by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), China’s digital economy reached RMB 35.8 trillion in 2019, accounting for 36.2% of GDP. Globally, the market value of digital economy platforms, public cloud, IoT spending and blockchain patents in China and America made up 90%, 75%+, 50% and 75% of the global total respectively.
In terms of China’s industrial digitization, the digital economy, as a part of the real economy, has promoted the transformation and upgrading of industrial entities. It has become the main form of the integration and innovative development of digital economy and real economy to improve the efficiency of traditional production factors by taking data from industrial entities as the core production factor and digital technology as an important driving force, and optimizing the allocation of factors. During the COVID-19 pandemic last year, the RMB 15 billion WeChat Pay consumption vouchers stimulated RMB 100 billion consumption and benefited 130 consumer industries. In June, the Canton Fair, known as the weather vane of China’s imports and exports, was held on cloud for the first time, which was a valuable exploration for the high-level integration and development of digital economy and real economy. It offered services such as exhibit display, matchmaking of global supply and procurement, conference services and cross-border e-commerce.
In face of labor shortage of highly repetitive and high-intensity work such as processing and assembly, packaging, inspection and carrying in the manufacturing industry, the application of digital technology and intelligent machines optimizes the process and achieves the goal of downsizing for efficiency and higher quality. It’s more worth mentioning that in the R&D and design process, technologies such as data-driven artificial intelligence can turn industrial knowledge and experience to data, algorithms and models, shortening the R&D cycle and improving efficiency. For example, COMAC has built an industrial cloud platform for networked global R&D and manufacturing collaboration and realized complete data unification on the C919 project. As a result, the R&D cycle of C919 was shortened by 20% and the production efficiency increased by 30%.
Although China stands at the forefront of digitization worldwide, it still falls behind many developed countries in the field of industrial digitization. To shore up the weakness, it’s urgent to cultivate digital talents. According to the latest data released by CAICT, in 2020, the WeChat ecosystem created 36+ million new jobs, of which 11+ million were offered by mini programs and video accounts. However, the supporting mechanism and service system of the new employment form need to be improved, and there are still many irregularities in the talent training mechanism.
According to the forecast in the report titled Reskilling China released by McKinsey Global Institute, by 2030, 36% of the changes in occupations and skills worldwide will occur in China. The key to achieving such industrial transformation is comprehensively upgrading employees’ skills. Therefore, it’s necessary to improve higher education and vocational education, and continue to provide free online courses and employment guidance services for groups with employment difficulties. For example, a digital school for lifelong learning can be established for workers to promote the smooth transition from demographic dividends to talent dividends, and provide sufficient human resources for industrial digitization.
The dual-circulation strategy will be implemented during the 14th Five-Year Plan period. Whether China can seize the opportunities of a new round of industrial and technological revolution, and perform an overtake when changing track during this period is closely related to national rejuvenation. In this process, government regulation and guidance are crucial in addition to giving full play to the role of platform enterprises and leading entities. On one hand, it’s necessary to effectively improve digital governance capability, properly define data ownership in the process of data production, aggregation, possession and application, and turn data into resources and capital on the basis of the rule of law. On the other hand, it’s important to optimize the cooperation mechanism between the government and the market, and promote the openness and sharing of industrial Internet platforms during development.
(Author: Su Jian, Professor and PhD Supervisor of School of Economics at Peking University, Director of China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, Chairman of Beijing Foreign Economics Institute)