Five Chinese ministries issue official document! Action Plan for Holistic Digital Transformation Released, ushering in a "construction blueprint" for smart city development.

Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), together with the National Data Administration (NDA) and three other ministries, jointly issued the Action Plan for Deepening Smart City Development and Promoting City-Wide Digital Transformation (hereinafter referred to as the Action Plan). This new document, formulated on the basis of the Guiding Opinions released in May 2024, marks a critical stage in China’s smart city development—shifting from blueprint planning to substantive implementation.

If last year’s Guiding Opinions drew a “roadmap” for smart city development, this year’s Action Plan serves as a detailed “implementation blueprint.” The document sets clear timelines and quantifiable goals: to build more than 50 city-wide digital transformation cities by the end of 2027, and to foster a number of modern cities with international competitiveness by 2035, demonstrating the country’s resolve to advance urban digital transformation.

The Action Plan establishes a framework of “Six Major Initiatives,” including:

Smart and Efficient Urban Governance, Digital Better Life, Digital Economy Empowerment, Urban Digital Renewal, Foundation-Building for Digital Transformation, and Data-Adaptive Reform and Innovation. These contents are more detailed, goals more quantifiable, and mechanisms more systematic.

The document particularly emphasizes taking cities as important carriers for building a Digital China, strengthening the construction of data infrastructure, promoting the market-based allocation of data factors, building a model service system, and facilitating coordinated development of city clusters. Industry insiders believe that the release of the Action Plan signals that China’s smart city construction is moving from the concept advocacy stage to the full implementation stage, and urban digital transformation will enter a new cycle of systematization and operation.

The overall positioning of the Action Plan has achieved a significant upgrade, explicitly proposing to “take cities as comprehensive carriers for advancing the construction of a Digital China.” This statement goes beyond previous directional guidance, emphasizing the dominant and bearing role of cities in digital transformation, reflecting a shift from concept elaboration to implementation推进.

Compared with the three major directions of “promotion across all fields, enhancement in all dimensions, and optimization in the whole process” put forward in the Guiding Opinions, the Action Plan constructs a more operable “Six Major Initiatives” framework. This framework covers dimensions such as governance improvement, livelihood services, economic empowerment, urban renewal, infrastructure construction, and institutional reform. Each initiative is equipped with specific implementation paths, such as featured scenarios like “Efficiently Handling One Matter,” making policy implementation more feasible.

The Guiding Opinions focused more on data, infrastructure, standards, and security, such as unified planning architecture, common foundations, digital infrastructure, and urban security resilience.

The Action Plan has significantly strengthened in this regard, no longer merely emphasizing “construction,” but focusing on “building data infrastructure, promoting IoT, data connectivity and intelligent connectivity, advancing the marketization of data factors, developing model services, and fostering new business formats.” More technical keywords appear in the document, such as “urban digital infrastructure,” “Model as a Service (MaaS),” and “coordinated operation of city clusters,” indicating that smart cities are shifting from the construction stage to the operation stage.

In the Guiding Opinions, institutional innovation, standard construction, organization and implementation, and funding and talent guarantees were listed as necessary conditions.

The Action Plan is more detailed in this regard, adding contents such as “operation assessment mechanisms,” “city cluster collaboration mechanisms,” “classified and graded promotion,” “building urban large models,” “strengthening the construction of professional talent teams,” and “international cooperation.” From organization to ecology, from management to talents, a closed-loop system has basically been formed, revealing a signal that smart cities have entered the stage of systematic governance from the planning stage.

Overall, the Guiding Opinions expound concepts and set directions, while the Action Plan specifies indicators and focuses on implementation. The former is a roadmap for top-level design, and the latter is an implementation blueprint and task list. The two documents are closely connected, and the changes are mainly reflected in four aspects: first, from macro to quantification, with clearer goals; second, from framework to action, with more specific tasks; third, from individual cities to city clusters, with emphasis on regional coordination; fourth, from construction to operation, with more prominent governance mechanisms and assessment systems.

This change is particularly noteworthy. The 2024 document brought more opportunities for standardized and basic construction, such as the data factor system, urban digital infrastructure, and standard system establishment; while the 2025 Action Plan marks the entry into a new stage of project operation, model construction, and indicator assessment.

In terms of action rhythm, the document sets a clear timetable: by the end of 2025, select a number of mega-cities and super-large cities as the first batch of pilots; by 2027, form replicable construction templates; by 2030, achieve the basic completion of digital infrastructure construction in major cities across the country, and fully digitize urban operation and services.

An important shift is that this Action Plan moves from “smart cities” to “urban digitalization.” In the past, it followed the idea of informatization construction, with various departments building systems; now it adopts the idea of system integration, focusing on building an “urban digital infrastructure.” In other words, urban digital transformation has entered a new stage of competing in systems, computing power, and coordination, rather than just applications and platforms.

Whether it is first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, or third- and fourth-tier cities catching up, this Action Plan clearly points out a common direction: the new track of urban competition is comprehensively shifting from the traditional physical territory to the promising digital space, drawing a new “watershed” for all cities. Urban competitiveness no longer depends solely on physical scale, but more on its insight and operation capabilities in the digital space. Those who take the lead in digital transformation and lay a solid foundation will hold the key to unlocking a new development order in the next decade. The urban development pattern in the next decade will surely be redefined by the speed and quality of today’s digital underlying construction.