On December 9, Zheng Yongnian, chairman of the Guangzhou Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Research Institute and dean of the Qianhai Institute of International Affairs at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), attended the "Digital Bay Area Development Forum" in Nansha, Guangzhou, and said that China needs to overcome the "medium technology trap." Zheng Yongnian said that the concept of "middle technology trap" was proposed by him and his research team in recent years, with reference to the history of industrialization development in the past hundreds of years: for an economy to cross the middle-income trap and become a developed economy, it must achieve sustainable industrial upgrading.
Zheng Yongnian also said that the 20th National Congress report proposed to achieve Chinese-style modernization, but according to estimates by him and his research team, so far in modern times, the population of high-income countries that have achieved modernization in the world is less than 1 billion, while China has a population of 1.4 billion.
"This is a very difficult task." Zheng Yongnian said.
He also said that in terms of technological development, although China is leading or even surpassing developed countries in some fields, from the perspective of people's livelihood and economic fields, it is still at a "medium technology" level overall. The basis for this judgment includes: first, China still has relatively few original technologies from "0-1"; second, from the perspective of "1-10" applied technologies, China's industrial chain belongs to the "3-7" level. At the same time, in terms of the development of manufacturing, the United States is in the first echelon, Japan and Europe are in the second echelon, and China is still in the third echelon.
Zheng Yongnian believes that China is now facing major changes unseen in a century, and there are risks of being stuck, system decoupling, and the medium-level technical level being solidified. Looking at the development of the global digital economy in this context, the American model is very obviously offensive. So far, it is a free-range model that focuses on development and has not yet seen effective supervision. It is still enterprise-oriented and opposes early government intervention. The European model adopts defensive policies and pays more attention to rule-making in the absence of particularly large Internet companies. The models of Asian economies, such as Singapore and Vietnam, are fully open and limited management, while the Chinese model is more unique.
"Especially taking artificial intelligence as an example, basically the competition in the world today is competition between American companies." Zheng Yongnian said that currently different models have their own advantages and disadvantages, and they cannot be generalized. For example, insufficient supervision in the United States has led to populism, which is also a serious problem.
Zheng Yongnian also said that as an international political scholar, he is worried about the "dominance" of the United States in the field of digital economy, because this is a very dangerous situation. He believes that judging from the current infrastructure of global Internet companies, it is mainly China and the United States. China has the advantage of developing the digital economy, but it needs "effective policies to catch up with the United States and to be able to constrain the United States to a certain extent."
Zheng Yongnian also expressed the hope that the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area can make good use of the advantages of "one country, two systems" and "three customs territories" to speed up the pace of exploration so that the "Digital Bay Area" will not only be the development of Guangdong and the Greater Bay Area, but also explore a replicable and promoteable model for the country's digital development.