At the 10th Dongsha Lake Forum hosted by the China Management Science Society, Professor Li Xiaodong, founder of Fuxi Think Tank, gave a report entitled "High-quality Development of Digital Economy: From the Perspective of Open Data Exchange", which was carried out from the perspective of open data exchange and in-depth discussion on how to achieve high-quality development of digital economy. The report reads as follows:
1. The digital economy is an inevitable choice for the high-quality development of China's economy and society, and the construction of a digital China supports the realization of the 2035 and 2049 goals
Reaching carbon peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 is a solemn commitment of China to the world. For a developing country like China, with a population of 1.4 billion, this goal is very challenging. China's energy carbon emissions are currently around 44%, which is a big challenge compared to some developed countries. Under such circumstances, how we choose the development path that is suitable for a country like China that pursues a better life is very crucial.
I've found that no other country has embraced the digital economy as much as China, including the data element we're talking about now. In fact, this is a very interesting phenomenon, and I personally believe that China must always choose a suitable development direction, and the digital economy is a more suitable choice.
In the past few years, the state has attached great importance to this work, until February this year, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the "Overall Layout Plan for the Construction of Digital China", which combines the planning of infrastructure and digital development and application to form a set of overall plans. This plan guides us on how to develop the digital economy, digital society, digital culture, digital ecology, and digital infrastructure in the future, and lays out network facilities, computing power facilities, application infrastructure, technical security, and international cooperation.
There are two very important foundations in this plan to support the above applications, that is, the so-called "five-in-one", social, cultural, economic, government affairs, and digital ecological civilization, to support the development of these five areas, including the digital economy, in fact, there are two foundations, one is the data resource system, and the other is the digital infrastructure. Only by laying a solid foundation for these two major foundations will it be possible to accomplish economic and social development.
Whether it is a data resource system or a digital infrastructure, data is the core. Whether it is the construction of the data resource system or the three major infrastructures of the application computing power network covered by the digital infrastructure, they are all carried out around the six links of data collection, transmission, calculation, storage, application, and even extinction, so the data resource system is the core of the construction.
The digital economy should be based on data, and we emphasize the use of digital information and knowledge as the element, and the Internet as the key infrastructure. There are many studies, such as those related to the traditional agricultural economy, industrial economy, and digital economy. As a developed country, especially a country with a developed digital economy, the proportion of agriculture in the United States is decreasing year by year, reaching 1.3% of the agricultural population, plus only 3% of the rest of the population, which is actually a trend. We say that the trend from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy to a digital economy is unavoidable.
Whether from the perspective of factors of production or structural changes, there is a very key point, that is, the traditional five factors (land, labor, technology, capital, data), in the era of agricultural economy, mainly land and labor, when it is necessary to engage in agricultural production, 90% of the population is in agriculture (before the 18th century). When it comes to the industrial economy, there are two new factors (capital factor and technical factor), and there is a very important point at this time, which is to reduce manufacturing, and the consumption of natural resources in the production process is very large, so carbon emissions are very high.
Our country has actually achieved the results of more than 200 years of industrialization in Western countries in 40 years of reform, so this carbon emission is very high, and we do need a lot of construction, which has caused the consumption of resources. However, in the era of digital economy, one of the biggest features is that reduced manufacturing can be turned into incremental manufacturing, which is a very critical change. From the original producer-centric to consumer-centric, two-dimensional superposition to reduce resource consumption. The first is to understand the needs of users more accurately and reduce the scale of production, and the second is to greatly reduce consumption when the production process changes from reduced manufacturing to incremental manufacturing, so the digital economy will also support the construction of the civilization process.
After the G20 Hangzhou Summit released the "G20 Digital Economy Development and Cooperation Initiative" proposed the digital economy, there was a definition of the digital economy, and then it was also defined in the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Digital Economy", but there are still some changes in everyone's understanding.
2. The digital economy uses digital data resources such as information and knowledge as the key elements, and the Internet as the key infrastructure
The digital economy is a new economic form after the agricultural economy and the industrial economy, and some people often say that the digital economy and the real economy are juxtaposed, forming a binary opposition, and they feel that the digital economy and the real economy are different. We don't think so, the digital economy is indeed the form of the digital transformation of the real economy, but it is not completely binary opposed to the traditional economy.
What is data? From the perspective of the elements of the data economy, not all data can be called elements, and the data resources of digital knowledge and information are emphasized here as the key elements.
It has been 50 years since the Internet began to be tested in 1969 and officially born in 1974. There are a lot of people who say that we should make a network of our own. Nowadays, there are many words about the Internet, but because of the translation problems between Chinese and English, such as the Internet of Things, everyone thinks that the Internet of Things is different from the Internet. However, if you look at the original meaning of English or Internet, including the Internet of Vehicles, the Internet of Agriculture, etc., the actual essence is still Internet, which is what we especially want to emphasize.
In the course of the development of the Internet in the past half century, it has been evolving along with the development of the economy. The Internet is essentially a product of economic globalization, but the Internet supports economic globalization, which is a process that complements and promotes each other, and is accompanied by the rapid evolution of the process of informatization.
We have a judgment that the Internet has entered the 3.0 stage after more than 20 years of 1.0 and nearly 20 years of 2.0 stage. In the early days of the Internet, it was all about connecting different networks around the world. In the second stage, which is the World Wide Web stage, a large number of websites were established, and there were all kinds of data in the websites, so in the 90s of the 20th century, the network economy, the Internet economy, etc. appeared. The core of the Internet is interconnection and data transmission. In the third stage, it is necessary to connect these data elements and data resources together, so it enters the stage of data interconnection, which is not the data itself, but the interconnection of the qualification space where the data is stored.
3. Open data exchange is an important foundation for the high-quality development of the digital economy, facing the severe challenge of data silos
The third is from the perspective of open data exchange, which is an important foundation for the high-quality development of the digital economy. If the data is not used for exchange, or if the exchange is conditional and not in an open way, this is a big problem. The core element of the Internet is openness. Openness and sharing are the core genes of the Internet. Now, with everyone's attention to the digital economy and the recognition of the value of data elements, including concerns about data security governance, the phenomenon of data silos is very serious.
In 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to the World Internet Conference, emphasizing that "let digital civilization benefit the people of all countries and promote the construction of a community with a shared future for mankind". After 2016, we no longer mentioned the network economy, the Internet economy, the information economy, etc., and the digital economy began to unify the terminology.
All of this, including the construction of digital China, from the five-in-one to four aspects and two foundations, as well as the six aspects of the global digital development path, the core is the support of the five elements. Among the five elements, the core of land, labor, capital, and technology needs data to get through, which is the "four beams and eight pillars" of China's development of digital economy and construction of digital civilization.
In a sense, data elements do not exist alone, financial data is with capital, talent data is with labor, and there are many studies in the academic community on what the law of data elements is. But there is a very key question, what is the role of data? We say that data itself should run through the whole process of value creation, transformation and realization. If the data cannot be connected and exchanged openly, the process will not work. The manufacturing link and the sales link are not connected, which is not good.
For example, Tencent, Ali and other large platforms, from the original to do C terminal business, to do sales business, and finally to do in the field of industrial manufacturing, why? They want to open up the process of value creation and realization, which is a very important trend in the entire industry.
For the production and operation management of the enterprise itself, the value creation, transformation and practice of the social level actually need to be opened, and the key to digitalization is to connect the digitized data from different links, and open exchange is very critical at this time.
However, there is a very critical issue in this open exchange, that is, the issue of data rights confirmation. In this data system, the issue of data property rights has been put on hold for the time being. But if we want to encourage an open exchange of data, data ownership is still key. However, the confirmation of ownership is not a single ownership, and there are many rights that evolve from ownership, ownership, right of use, etc. In this process, how do we confirm rights? What rights do we have? Are there any corresponding technical means? We know that data is easy to be copied, and what kind of technical means can do a good job in confirming rights, and can achieve the resource, assetization and capitalization of data, which is very crucial. We say that the confirmation of rights is an important issue, but the core of the confirmation of rights is to turn it into a resource, and only by turning it into a resource can it be turned into an asset and capital.
Only the large circulation of data resources can open up the whole chain process of value creation. But the core lies in how to do this? How can we collude data from different regions and fields? There are also cross-organizational, cross-regional, cross-metro and cross-border issues, which are very critical issues.
More often than not, concentration can do great things. If an island is formed, it is simple, and the island is bulldozed, so that it is connected, which is a model of data middle platform. In fact, every island has its rights, and how we can connect them is the key.
4. Data infrastructure supports the construction and open exchange of data resource systems, and promotes the high-quality development of the digital economy
Finally, I would like to say that there is a suitable data infrastructure to support the construction and open exchange of data resource systems. Without the support of these corresponding technologies and platforms, all the management issues and policy issues we discuss are empty words.
There is a very important problem in the six links of data collection, transmission, calculation, storage, application, and extinction, which is the so-called problem of data interoperability, and the core of interoperability is cross-domain interoperability. How can the data in this domain be transferred to another domain after confirmation, and the transmission application can do it, so it is necessary to solve the three major problems of identity confirmation, authentication and authorization, and secure exchange.
So far, I haven't seen any city receive all the data in the data center mode, because this is my asset, why should I give it to you? The core lies in the ability to find, "usable but invisible, data not out of the domain", this sentence is easy to say, but it is a model that has worked well on the Internet in the past 50 years, especially in the last 30 years of the World Wide Web.
There is a very critical issue in the development ecology of the digital economy, from the bottom of the computing network to support the digital development and application above, there must be a data infrastructure in the middle, which is clearly defined in the 2021 "Data Security Law", the country implements the big data strategy and builds data infrastructure, of course, the scope of data infrastructure is not only these.
There are two problems that need to be solved, one is the problem of technology and standards, and the other is the problem of management and industrial ecology. It is not possible to have only management and policy without technical support, and it is also impossible to have only technology without corresponding management guarantees.
Data infrastructure is an effective way to promote data quality. However, how to build the data foundation and how to manage and govern it after it is built is actually a very important difficulty. Each of us lives in a big country with a digital economy, and we currently have the second largest digital economy in the world.
In this process, how can we revitalize the data elements, how can we do it through effective data infrastructure, and how can we do it in two lines: management and technology. In fact, this is a challenge for everyone.