President Xi Emphasizes Importance of Big Data

On December 8th, President Xi Jinping chaired the CPC Politburo's second collective study session on the implementation of the nation's big data strategy and emphasized importance of protecting the country's data.

This is the third speech President Xi has made on the topics of cyber strategy and cybersecurity in the past two years. President Xi elaborated on how to handle openness and indigenous innovation, and balance security and development in a meeting on Cybersecurity and Informatization on April 19, 2016. On October 9, 2016, in a CPC Politburo meeting on China's cyber strategy, President Xi called for acceleration of a substitution plan with domestic indigenous controllable technology and construction of a secure and controllable information technology system.
 
This time, in his speech, President Xi sees big data as having a significant impact on economic development, social governance, state governance, and people's livelihood and laid out five main tasks to build a "Digital China". Those tasks include the following as summarized below:  

1. Promote the innovation and development of big data technology
2. ​Build a digital economy with data as a key enabler
3. Improve the country's capability in governance
4. Improve people's livelihood by applying big data
5. Protect data