New Smart Cities in China under the Background of Digital China

The 14th Five Year Plan of the country clearly states: "Strengthen the construction of digital society and digital government, enhance the level of digital intelligence in urban services, social governance, and other areas." In this context, smart cities driven by digital technology have become an important link connecting digital government and intelligent society. Smart cities have been developing in China for over a decade and have become a national strategic choice for building a digital China and developing the digital economy. From the launch of large-scale pilot projects in 2012, to the elevation of smart cities to a national strategy in 2014, and to the first proposal of building a "new type of smart city" in the 13th Five Year Plan in 2016, these mark a new stage of pursuing high-quality development in the construction of smart cities. Since the 14th Five Year Plan, the construction of new smart cities has been in full swing. From the discussion on how to make the "urban brain" smarter at the 2020 National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, to the heated discussion on the construction of new smart cities at the 2021 National People's Political Consultative Conference and the 2022 Government Work Report, which clearly stated the need to "build digital information infrastructure, promote the large-scale application of 5G, promote industrial digital transformation, and develop smart cities and digital villages," the new smart city has become a social consensus as an advanced stage of urban digital construction.

Recently, the overall planning document for Digital China was released. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the "Overall Layout Plan for Digital China Construction" and issued a notice requiring all regions and departments to conscientiously implement it based on their actual situation. As a heavyweight document that affects China's future development, this has also been praised by the industry as the "digital era is coming". The new smart city is a Chinese expression of the concept of smart city proposed in response to the real needs of the economy and society, with the core of serving the people wholeheartedly, in the context of continuous penetration of digital technology. It fully embodies the urban development concept with Chinese characteristics.

Smart city is a high-end form of modern urban development. As the most active testing ground for digital innovation in the world, China's new smart city is a major strategic choice made by the country based on the goals of informatization, industrialization, and urbanization. It is also an important carrier for developing digital China, digital economy, and promoting the modernization of the national governance system and governance capacity. Since 2020, events such as the COVID-19 have made China's modern urban management face many practical challenges, and vigorously developing new smart cities has become an inevitable strategic choice. How to enhance the resilience of urban rapid recovery and sustainable development during abnormal periods is a new focus for the construction of new smart cities. It can be seen that it is urgent to fully leverage the empowering role of digital technology, grasp the changing laws of urban spatial scale lifestyle and governance, and explore solutions to the current development challenges of smart cities.