Zhang Jun: China quickly transforms to the digital economy

Zhang Jun

There is no doubt that China has paid a huge price to the spread of coronary virus diseases from Wuhan 2019.Due to the implementation of a comprehensive blocking policy, the large -scale population flow was stopped in the past, and economic activities were stopped for almost two months.

With the lifting policy of the second quarter, the economy has been partially recovered.However, the obvious fact is that the economic activities of a large number of industrial and commercial individuals that have fallen due to the impact of the epidemic situation are difficult to recover, especially the service area, it is impossible to comprehensively recover the economy.

However, this is not the beginning of the long -term decline of China's economy. On the contrary, its economic toughness performance is obvious.Since the epidemic, the application scenario of the digital economy has entered the life of the Chinese people.Family use JD.com, Meituan, Hungry, Hungoto, Pinduoduo and other applications to buy grain, oil, vegetables and daily necessities; government, enterprises and education institutions use Tencent conferences, Bilibili, Ding Ding, Corporate WeChat, etc.Teaching and collaborative office; hundreds of millions of Chinese people use their mobile phones to show their health code to travel or enter and exit public places.

This is exactly a strong change in China's economy.Although the epidemic has paid the price of the Chinese economy, the process of economy to digital transformation unexpectedly accelerated.

The campus and office are closed under the isolated home due to the epidemic. However, various schools and educational institutions in China have been transformed into online teaching in just one month. This change is difficult to imagine that it will happen.This rapid transformation has promoted the huge development of Chinese online conferences and education digital platforms.Various online meetings, live teaching, remote office, online interviews, signing, exhibitions, and even online consultations have quietly become a new economic format.

The Tencent Conference is an audio and video conference product based on Tencent Cloud, headquarters in Shenzhen. It has been launched for less than nine months and has become the most useful video conference application in China.It provides online meetings with free and 300 people during the epidemic. The computing resources invested more than 1 million cores, setting a record of Chinese cloud computing history.In addition, during the epidemic, the number of enterprises and social organizations initiated online meetings on the nails, with a maximum of 20 million games in a single day and more than 100 million people.

If you travel around China today, enter the airport and hotel, you need to show your health code on your mobile phone.It is based on personal real big data. The personal QR code generated on the mobile phone can track its own travel records in the past 14 days to show information about whether there have been information in the areas of serious epidemics.The health code was developed by the Ali technical team and local governments of Hangzhou in February this year, and soon covered all over the country.The application scenarios of the health code are very extensive and can help government, social groups, enterprises, schools, and service agencies carry out epidemic prevention management and epidemic control.

In the past six months, China's medical and health industry has also accelerated digital change due to epidemic conditions.Thanks to the developed express delivery systems of urban and rural areas in China, online drug purchases of Chinese families are quite popular.Digital change hopes to focus on diagnosis and treatment.Based on the 5G network remote consultation platform, this time, the main hospitals in Wuhan, who are infected with crown disease, played an important role. Using video consultation with Beijing medical experts, it greatly improved the effect of diagnosis and treatment of cases.

However, this is just the beginning of medical digital.It can be expected that with the popularity of China's 5G networks, the digital penetration rate of diagnosis and treatment will increase significantly, and remote consultation and remote live broadcast will be widely used.Considering the imbalance of the distribution of medical resources, this is particularly important to more reasonable medical needs to meet the medical needs of Chinese families.

Seeing the huge potential of technology in the field of medical health, more and more technology companies in China are committed to promoting the application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in the medical field and digital transformation of medical care.The Ping An Good Doctor of China Ping An Group is well -known. Huawei Cloud launched the EIHEALTH AI R & D platform for virus genome research, antiviral drug research and development, and anti -epidemic medical imaging research and analysis, which accelerated the development and development of antiVirus detection speed.Chinese official media reported that during the epidemic, many first -tier hospitals' computer tomography (CT) shooting volume has been comparable to last year, which is obviously beneficial to the application of AI auxiliary screening technology.

Digital transformation is also beyond imagination in China's financial field.Big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and distributed computing architecture empower traditional commercial banks, create unprecedented application scenarios and recognition capabilities, and greatly improve the ability to provide financing services to small and micro -enterprises and families.In the past, the credit financing of small and micro enterprises was difficult, and now only financial technology companies such as Ant Financial, with the help of Alipay and My Bank, we will serve small and micro -industry and commerce customers last year.More than 16 million households provide financing up to 2 trillion yuan.

Not only does the fintech company continue to expand, but the digital transformation of China's commercial banking industry is also quite dazzling.According to Aurora (Aurora), in March 2020, according to the scale of the customer group, Chinese mobile banking applications are ranked third after a short video and comprehensive mall, and the user reaches 562 million.Including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Construction Bank, the mobile banks of several largest commercial banks in China are active users per month, with an average of 50 million people.

The research report released by the China Information and Communication Research Institute (2019) has shown that in the past few years, China's digital economy has achieved rapid expansion at the faster growth rate as much as the name of GDP (GDP).In 2018, the scale of China's digital economy reached 3.1.3 trillion yuan (about 4.73 trillion US dollars), accounting for about 34.8%of GDP.Although this number is only one -third of the United States, China's economic digital growth trend cannot be underestimated.In fact, China's GDP has grown in recent years, and about two -thirds can be attributed to the expansion of the digital economy.This trend is basically consistent with the national economic accounting data updated by the National Bureau of Statistics.

Economic digitalization and platformization have created extraordinary employment opportunities in China. More and more young people want to be independent professionals relying on digital platforms. This is a new zero -time economy.Because the labor market has become more and more flexible, although China's GDP growth rate has slowed down in recent years, the unemployment rate in cities and towns has not increased significantly, indicating that the expansion of the digital economy has significantly improved China's ability to absorb employment.

According to data from the China Information and Communication Research Institute, the employment positions in China's digital economy in 2018 were 191 million, accounting for a quarter of the total number of employment of the year, an increase of 11.5%year -on -year, significantly higher than the growth rate of the national total employment scale in the same period.

In the past 10 years, although China is still relatively backward in some key core technology areas, a large number of Chinese technology companies are committed to the research and application of cutting -edge technology in the fields of cutting -edge science and technology in the fields of cutting -edge technology in 5G, quantum communication, voice recognition, and super computer.Digital transformation process.China has gained a strong development momentum in the fields of mobile payment, sharing economy, online shopping, robotic manufacturing, and has become a new source of economic growth. This is beyond doubt.

It now seems that global, this year China is most likely the only economy that can achieve positive growth, and the digital transformation of the economy is absolutely contributed.The Chinese government has clearly stated that it will increase investment in new infrastructure in the next five years and accelerate the pace of new infrastructure construction such as 5G networks and data centers.In this way, the structural transformation of China's economy will be promoted to a greater extent.

The author is the dean of the School of Economics of China Fudan University and the director of the China Economic Research Center

English Title: CHINAS RAPID Shift to a Digital Economy