Data system construction spotlighted

China will ratchet up resources to accelerate the building of basic systems for data and leverage innovative digital technologies to bolster industrial upgrading, part of a broader push to promote the high-quality development of the economy and foster new quality productive forces, said officials, company executives and experts.

Heightened efforts should be made to boost the deeper integration of the digital and real economies, vigorously develop the core industries of the digital economy, and advance the digital transformation of industries, said Qin Boyong, vice-chairwoman of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the country's top political advisory body. 

Qin made the remarks at the opening ceremony of the China International Big Data Industry Expo 2024, which kicked off on Wednesday in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province.

She stressed the need to speed up the construction of basic systems for data and data infrastructure, press ahead with reforms related to the market-oriented allocation of data elements, use digital technologies to drive the urban digital transformation and the development of digital villages, and expand international cooperation in the digital economy domain. 

Xu Lin, Party secretary of Guizhou, said that the province will make more efforts to build intelligent computing industrial clusters with a key focus on artificial intelligence technology, nurture a batch of industry-specific large language models, push forward the construction of data centers and expand the application scenarios of data elements in more fields. 

Often dubbed China's big data hub, the mountainous province of Guizhou is the country's first national big data comprehensive pilot zone, and has been promoting the big data industry as the backbone of the province's high-quality social and economic development. 

Xu said that Guizhou's total computing power has reached 40 EFLOPS, making it one of the regions with the strongest intelligent computing capabilities nationwide. EFLOPS is a unit of the speed of computer systems, equal to one quintillion floating-point operations a second.

Liu Liehong, head of the National Data Administration, said that the administration is working with relevant departments to study and formulate policies concerning the data industry, in order to unleash the value of massive data resources and improve the competitiveness of China's data industry. 

"As a new type of production factor, data has been deeply integrated into various areas of the economy and society," Liu said, while emphasizing the significance of the cultivation of the data industry in fostering new quality productive forces and driving the country's high-quality economic growth. 

Noting that the data industry serves as an important foundation for promoting the reforms related to the market-oriented allocation of data elements, Liu called for efforts to bolster the development and openness of data, establish data industry clusters with international competitiveness, and step up policy support to achieve technological breakthroughs in the data sector. 

China's total data output reached 32.85 zettabytes in 2023, an increase of 22.4 percent year-on-year, while the added value of core digital economy industries accounted for 10 percent of GDP, according to the National Data Administration.

According to a guideline jointly released by the administration and several other government bodies, China plans to expand the application scenarios for data in 12 key fields, including smart manufacturing, modern agriculture, trade circulation and transportation. The annual growth rate of the data industry is estimated to surpass 20 percent by the end of 2026. 

Chen Zhongyue, chairman of China Unicom, said the company is beefing up efforts to promote the construction of new types of infrastructure such as intelligent computing power networks, facilitate the development next-generation wireless communication technology, and accelerate the industrial applications of its self-developed large language model, called Yuanjing. 

Chen said the company has developed 35 industry-specific Yuanjing models, which have benefited urban governance, economic operations, information consumption and industrial manufacturing, adding that more efforts are needed to make breakthroughs in the key technologies of big data and LLMs, and provide more intelligent, convenient digital services in Guizhou. 

Qi Xiangdong, chairman of Chinese cybersecurity company Qi-Anxin Technology Group, said as new cybersecurity-related challenges, such as privacy and data leakage, have appeared along with the development of AI and data sharing, safeguarding data security is of vital importance in bolstering data transaction and developing the digital economy. 

Qi said the production, application and circulation of data is now facing security issues, while calling for establishing a unified and systematic network security system to fend off potential cyberattacks.

Zhao Houlin, former secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, said China should play a bigger role in promoting the governance and application of data elements, and participating in the formulation of international technical standards regarding data.  

Contact the writers at fanfeifei@chinadaily.com.cn