Why is Big Data so important? Why do governments invest massively in Big Data? China and its ambitions

Introduction

At present, big data, as the most active technological innovation element in the new industrial revolution, is comprehensively reconstructing the fields of global production, circulation, distribution, and consumption, which has a profound impact on global competition, national governance, economic development, industrial transformation, social life and so on.

The concept of big data was introduced in 1997 by Michael Cox and David Ellsworth of NASA Research Institute, who believe that big data is a huge amount of scientific data that can be visualized. IBM believes big data has three characteristics: Volume (large-scale), Variety, (diversity), Velocity (high-speed), called three Vs.

Why is Big Data so valuable to the digital economic development?

The development of the digital economy is the only way to realize high-quality economic development and build a modern economic system. To promote the digital transformation of the economy and society is actually the transformation from the era of the industrial economy to the era of the digital economy. Data plays a critical role in this transformation.

Data has great application potential in improving production efficiency, realizing intelligent production, improving factor allocation efficiency, stimulating new momentum, and cultivating new business conditions, and becomes an innovative power source to promote digital economic development.

Chinese car brand Nio manifactured by JAC Motors

Big data is a major development opportunity to reshape a country's competitive advantage

Countries around the world are fully aware of the strategic importance of big data for their countries and are starting to lay it out early. Competition among countries will change from competition for capital, land, and resources to competition for technology, data, and innovation.

The United States of America is the largest data-leading economy, according to the Harvard Business Review. The United Kingdom comes second, although it's important to note that if the EU is seen as a single entity it could rival the United States. In the past ten years, China has emerged as a new rival, the nation has grown from account for only 10% of the global data in 2010 to 20% in 2020. Developing and investing in big data is beneficial to transform ta nation's data resources and creates competitive advantages, to achieve simultaneous improvement of data scale, quality, and application. Thus way exploring and releasing the potential value of data resources, and effectively enhancing national competitiveness.

 Big data is an important innovation tool to modernize governance capabilities

Big data applications can reveal the relationship that traditional technology cannot achieve s, promote the open sharing of government data, promote the integration of social enterprise data and resource integration. Thus greatly enhancing the overall data analysis ability of a government, and provide new means to deal with complex social problems effectively.

The establishment of a management mechanism of "using data to make decisions, using data management, and innovating" and realizing scientific decision-making based on data will promote the progress of government management concepts. It further accelerates the construction of a government governed by law, innovation, and technology.

Sichuan, China, Chengdu City Center, 2020

Why is Big data so important to China?

Speeding up the construction of digital China is an important measure to cultivate new kinetic energy.

In November 2019, the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) has historically regarded data as an important factor of production like labor, capital, and land, and big data will play a more important and innovative role in the development of the digital economy.

For the first time, the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China took data as a factor of production to participate in the distribution of income, which was a major theoretical innovation, marking the independence of data from the technical elements into a separate factor of production.

Whether it is the development of digital economy, or the construction of digital government, smart city, smart society, the most critical link is to achieve the data resources across departments, cross-regional, cross-industry, cross-system, further transforming the rural areas and distributing power from urban to rural areas with the innovation of big data.