Author|Shen Yi, Professor and Director at Research Center for the Governance of Global Cyberspace, Fudan University.  The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a comprehensive blow and challenge to global governance. As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic is raging around the world. Albeit initially being a public health issue, the pandemic, due to its widespread impacts and severity to global governance, has posed a comprehensive challenge to the existing concept and practice of global governance. This challenge, overall speaking, is mainly reflected in the following three aspects: First, how to achieve global collaborative governance. From the global dimension, the response to COVID-19 is a typical test of global governance capacity. The key to the test is whether countries can achieve effective strategic coordination and policy cooperation globally, and subsequently whether they can build effective global actions to promote the mankind to deal with common security threats. From the current situation, such practices are not optimistic: judging from the existing governance performance, the United States and Western countries, who are regarded as the initiators of the first round of global governance, have failed to demonstrate the ability to live up to people’s expectations. The traditionally-perceived ‘core hub’ of the global governance system is thus experiencing crucial shocks and challenges. Second, the impacts and challenges to the governance paths, governance models and governance capacity-building of various countries. The pandemic has forced people to mull over different governance models and the comprehensive problems of different development paths, development systems and development concepts behind the different governance models. Although people still hold varying views on this issue, due to different perceptions and the common influence of complex factors, the reality, to a considerable extent, forces people to think in-depth about the issues typically grand in nature, such as system, path and model, which is a rare occurrence in recent years. Despite the debating ideas, it is apparent that unless a pragmatic breakthrough can be made at the cognitive level, the human society as a shared community will have to pay a higher price at the practical level in dealing under the COVID impact. Third, challenges to technology and its actual effectiveness in governance. Different countries hold different positions in information technology and information industry, and their respective technological capabilities and behavioral patterns have significant differences and comparative advantages. But in light of the pandemic, we all face the common problem of saving people's lives. The longer the delay, the more factors to take into consideration for improving the program, the slower the speed of implementation and the bigger price to pay. Dr. Aylward, head of the World Health Organization expert group, once pointed out that in the process of fighting the pandemic, the most important experience of China is speed, as well as its speedy, orderly, organized and coordinated action. The process of fighting against the pandemic has brought major impacts on information technology, cybersecurity, industrial technology, and product application. It has also provided huge opportunities for development. Based on the existing practices, unless people can effectively combine technology with governance practices in related issues and overcome the cognitive barriers shaped by traditional perceptions, advanced technology and application per se cannot automatically improve the governance performance in the face of the pandemic. Under the COVID situation, mentality of the treatment determines the direction Under the COVID situation, due to different national conditions, the mentalities of treatment among different countries have exhibited significant differences. The first way of thinking is to pay attention to human health and life security, under which the direction of action is to prioritize saving human health and safeguarding life security. The second way of thinking is to focus on economic development, with the belief that keeping economic activities intact should be a focus. China has chosen to focus on life-saving activities, which means upholding the belief that human life, people's health and life safety are priceless. To achieve such a goal, China paid a huge price in a short period of time to prevent and control the pandemic, and even in the most extreme case, the entire country entered into a state of de facto suspension. In terms of effectiveness, such a practice has ultimately yielded in remarkable results. The World Health Organization has made the following comments on China: In the fight against the COVID-19, the most important quality China has exhibited is that from the top decision-makers to the most ordinary people, everyone is very clear about their roles, how they should get involved, and how to play their respective parts. Such collectivism boasts very typical Chinese characteristics. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, the United States has made a different choice in light of the combat against the pandemic. The US has the world’s best medical, technological and information conditions, but it has been too concerned about capital market performance and how to avoid excessive losses by maintaining the financial indices of the stock market at high levels. In light of the pandemic, the US did not devote more energy to the rescue process but the maintenance of its hegemony at sea. The effect of this governance structure is that the country, while claiming less than 5 percent of the world’s overall population, has contributed to more than 20 percent of cumulative confirmed cases and death tolls. The COVID-19 and its governance have charted two different directions for the future under two different treatment ideas. What does this mean for global governance or cybersecurity? The pandemic has not interrupted globalization, nor will it reverse such a trend. COVID-19 and its governance have pointed out the development direction of future global governance, and of course, underscored the guiding significance of cybersecurity to the entire industry. The COVID-19 pandemic has pointed out three directions of global governance: First, achieve effective global cooperation. The pandemic highlights the need for high-quality globalization that can solve problems brought about by the globalization process; Second, turn the national governance capability into a “currency” that can win market recognition and deserve a price tag; Third, ensure the security of people’s lives as the top priority under the guidance of overall view of national security. While technology applications like big data and artificial intelligence have huge potential for effectively improving the performance of governance in light of the pandemic, the real differentiator lies in whether they can be substantially embedded in the governance process. The endeavors derived from the real-life anti-pandemic campaigns drive the technological revolution of communication and information. This will give rise to a significant trend of in-depth transformation of digital integration. The in-depth application and development of the digital technology provide effective support for the fight against the pandemic. The anti-COVID combat provides a profound impetus for the deep transformation of digital integration and blur the traditional online-offline dichotomy. Embedding digital technology into the fight against the contagion is divided into three stages: controlling the spread of the pandemic, exploring sustainable economic operations model, and psychological counseling and reconstruction. Digital technology has shown great potential in the three tasks of controlling infectious diseases: controlling the source of infection, cutting off the transmission path and protecting the vulnerable groups. But it requires a whole set of governance system to respond to new problems arising from the thorough application, proper preservation and secure disposition of the highly sensitive personal information and data that are used in the fight against the pandemic. In the future, all countries will embark on the path of intelligent digital governance. Whether the frontier of technology application represented by big data and artificial intelligence, or and the deep integration with the governance capacity and governance system of countries can be achieved, the core actor is not the technology or application itself but the sovereign state-the most important actor in the world today. For countries, digitalized intelligent governance inevitably means the high-speed flow of data and related content information on a global scale; the sharing of strategic data resources; the formation and shaping of more constructive norms and codes of conducts in the global cyberspace; the effective overcoming of prejudice and frictions; the active promotion of effective coordination of strategies and policies on the global scale; as well as the continuous deepening of trust among various actors as the strategic basis. To this end, all types of actors need to deepen trust and actively promote the effective coordination of strategies, policies and technologies. On this basis, the benign reforms in digitalization, cybersecurity and global cyberspace governance is also set to enter a new stage of development with more positive significance.