China News Online, December 14th (Fan Zhonghua) Currently, the digital economy has become the "commanding height" for many countries in the world to seize the initiative in future economic development. What are the characteristics and potentials of the development of China's urban digital economy?

How can smart cities become an important support for the national economic operation system?

　　On December 13, a set of data presented by the "China Urban Digital Economy Forum 2021" hosted by China Central Radio and Television Station Shanghai Station stated that according to the calculations of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, China's digital economy will rank second in the world in 2020 , The scale reached 39.2 trillion yuan (5.4 trillion US dollars), accounting for 38.6% of GDP.

　　At the forum, Hu Jianbo, vice president of the China Academy of Communications, said in the release of the "Report on the Development of China's Urban Digital Economy" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") that, on the whole, the cities with higher competitiveness in my country's digital economy are concentrated in the southern and eastern regions. , Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen are in the first echelon of my country's digital economy competitiveness.

　　According to the "Report", in the 2020 national ranking of the Digital Economy Competitiveness Index, from the perspective of east-west distribution, 12 cities in the eastern region are among the top 15 cities, and 12 cities in the southern region are among the top 15 cities from the north-south distribution. .

Shows large regional differences.

　　Wu Zhiqiang, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, explained that China's cities have a wide distribution space and large differences in resource endowments, so the development in the digital field is extremely uneven.

Looking at the history of the world’s urban development, it can be divided into four stages. In the first stage, cities provide places for transaction of goods; in the second stage, cities become gathering places of resources, but they do not produce resources; and the third stage is to enter the industrial revolution. Produce a lot of material wealth with the help of chemical raw materials.

Now that the city has entered the 4.0 stage, the intellectual innovation of numbers and brains determines the quality of urban development.

How many cities can enter the "intelligent city" determines whether the entire country can smoothly enter the 4.0 stage.

　　Wu Zhiqiang pointed out that in the current world, the four stages of human cities coexist, which can be divided into transactional cities, material cities, physical (resource) cities, and intellectual cities.

"'Intelligence' is the decisive factor for the quality of today's cities, and all cities in the world will be screened for this."

　　The "Report" divides cities across the country into three categories: comprehensive leadership, characteristic development, and potential enhancement based on the competitiveness of digital economy cities.

Among them, Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen all have high strategic positioning for digital economy construction, and they are comprehensive leading cities in China's digital economy, mainly represented by the huge digital economy, rich innovative elements, complete infrastructure, and rich digital formats. , The characteristics of strong digital demand, complete policy support, and obvious driving effect of the digital economy, have a leading role in the development of the national digital economy.

　　What challenges do different types of cities face in the process of developing a digital economy?

Photo courtesy of the organizer of He Jifeng, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

　　He Jifeng, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, pointed out in an exclusive interview with a reporter from Chinanews.com during the forum that at present, mega cities such as Shanghai and Beijing have good information infrastructure, and the data and platforms based on them can play a good role in the refined urban governance. However, the comprehensive construction of nationwide information infrastructure still requires a process.

For the first-mover big cities, “informatization also has a limit. It is difficult to achieve the goal of social governance, but also to make the people feel humanized, and to balance technology and people based on the people.”

Photo courtesy of Nie Junyu, Chief Expert of Smart City and Chief Expert of Digital Economy, Huawei China

　　Nie Junyu, chief expert on smart cities in China and chief expert on digital economy, pointed out that in the process of developing digital economy in various regions of China, they usually face several "common dilemmas": First, how to integrate regional digital economy including "double cycle" “City clusters” and other national strategies; the second is how each region should give full play to its location advantages, “digital economy has given many cities a chance to change lanes and overtake, which can forge long-term advantages and make up for shortcomings”; third, current cities Digitization pays more attention to long-term effectiveness and integrity, so it puts forward higher requirements for the system, complexity and logic of the overall solution for high-quality urban development.

　　How to make digital applications smoothly expand from "bonsai" to "panorama", from a single point project to a complete smart city?

Wu Zhiqiang believes that the biggest difficulty lies in the iteration of ideas.

　　"We usually think that a smart city must have a complete central system with a city brain at the top, but in fact, it is not enough for a city to have only one brain," said Wu Zhiqiang. Now many single-point scenarios have been intelligentized. Connected to form a city smart network, only one database "brain" will cause spam information to gather and power consumption will increase sharply. Therefore, cities should build database clusters as "brains" to collaborate with each other and release integrated wisdom.

Photo courtesy of Zhang Lijun, Vice President of Tencent and General Manager of East China Headquarters

　　When talking about how digital technology can change cities in the future, Zhang Lijun, vice president of Tencent and general manager of East China headquarters, believes that smart cities based on numbers will change the traditional top-down management model and make individuals the main body of the city.

"Smart cities will pay more attention to every individual's daily needs. The operation of the entire city is to think and develop around all aspects of citizens' lives. Everyone's interaction will contribute to the development of the city." (End)