Digital transformation in the People’s Republic of China: dynamics and trends

The article is devoted to the current issues related to the digital transformation of the People’s Republic of China. It presents a systematic analysis of the most important aspects of digital transformation in this country from various points of view. Digital transformation is, fi rst of all, a process and means of implementing the digital economy, and China is one of the leaders in this fi eld. Data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology show that the scale of China’s digital economy is increasing year by year, and in 2022 it reached 50,2 trillion yuan (about 7,27 trillion dollars), which is 41,5% of China’s GDP. However, the level of development of China’s digital economy is still insuffi cient — although China’s digital economy is large-scale and leads the world, its share in the overall structure of economic activity in this country is not high. The digital economy includes digital industrialization and industrial digitalization, the features of which, supported by specifi c data, are analyzed in detail in the article.The author has proven that China’s digital transformation is uneven. There is a huge disparity in the penetration levels of the three main sectors of the economy. Digital transformation has the highest penetration rate in the service sector — 44,7%, followed by the industrial sector — 24,0% and the agricultural sector — 10,5%; coastal areas live better than inland areas, the southern ones are better than the northern ones. At present, China has basically completed the design and structure of building a digital government. However, there are many problems in the process of building a digital government, including the overlapping functions of digital and traditional government, changes in the original government structure, and the impact of new rules and systems on the current governance system, which are discussed in detail in the article.The advantages of China’s digital economy are concentrated in new digital industries such as e-commerce, digital fi nance, cloud computing, unmanned aerial vehicles, and the photovoltaic industry. China not only promotes digital transformation in these areas of economic activity, but also carries out deep digital transformation in public services such as medical care, education, and security. At the same time, the characteristics of digital transformation have caused social problems such as digital inequality, the lack of reliable digital governance systems, and structural unemployment, which are analyzed in detail in the article. One of the eff ective means to solve these problems is digital trust