Why is China "focusing" on its national computer network?

“A unified computing network will optimize resources, reduce costs and help the country achieve breakthroughs in advanced technologies such as quantum information,”Liu Liehong, director of the National Data Administration (NDA), said in an article in the Communist Party of China's magazine Seeking Truth on March 17.

According to Mr. Liu, "computing power" has become "the main arena of scientific and technological competition" among major countries racing to lead the industries of the future.

“Computing power has now become the core productive force of a nation,”Mr. Liu said.

Advanced technologies and future industries represented by new materials, biopharmaceuticals, gene technology, deep-sea exploration, aviation and space exploration, etc. have created unprecedented demand for computing power infrastructure, Chinese officials said.

Beijing has put computing power at the forefront of its efforts to narrow the technology gap with the United States, especially in the field of artificial intelligence.

To that end, China established the NDA last October, which serves as both a promoter of the digital economy and an overseer of the booming data management sector.

According toSCMPChinese officials also said they would be "more tolerant" of failures in science and technology to eliminate a "culture of risk avoidance," giving young researchers more room to explore ways to realize national goals.

China is second only to the US in terms of aggregate computing power and aims to increase its capacity by half by 2025.

In a report released in August 2023, Tsinghua University, together with the International Data Corporation (IDC) and Chinese big data provider Inspur, said that for every percentage point increase in a country's computing power index, its digital economy will increase by 0.36% and its gross domestic product by 0.17%.

This index is compiled to track the overall development of computing power, computing efficiency, applications and infrastructure in 15 sample countries.

China's plan is to build eight national computing power centers and 10 national data center clusters, a massive project dubbed “Data East and Computing West,” which is expected to attract about 400 billion yuan ($55.58 billion) in investment each year.

The project is designed to merge computing centers across the country to create a network of combined, intelligent computing power and supercomputers, expected to be operational next year.

The project, set to launch in 2022, is aimed in part at addressing China's regional imbalance in digital resources — between the country's more prosperous east and energy-rich west.

NDA Director Liu Liehong said the project will also narrow the economic gap between domestic regions and attract more professionals to inland areas.

The project began in Shenzhen, southern China, in January 2022, with the construction of a computing center estimated to cost 466 million yuan ($64.7 million) in the first phase. When completed, the center will be capable of processing 1.6 billion images and 1.9 million hours of speech translation per hour.

It will be the most advanced and most expensive computing center (of its kind) in China's Pearl River Delta region.

While centralizing computing power will help make better use of resources, it also poses security challenges, according to the head of NDA.

He said:“We need to promote the strengthening of security system coordination of national centers. We must also prevent risks from regional network failures, power outages and extreme situations. In addition, industry and academia should work together to promote electronics, communications and computer science."