中国政府的数据战略：创建国家主导的市场

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The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s)

and do not necessarily reﬂect the views of the European Union.

BRIEF / 21

Oct 2021

CHINA’S DATA

STRATEGY

Creating a state-led market

Camille Boullenois

Project leader/Head of Brussels

oce at Sinolytics

INTRODUCTION

In 2019 and 2020, the European Union (1), the United

Kingdom (2) and the United States (3) issued strategy

papers on data governance acknowledging the im-

portance of data to their economic development and

national security. With dierent emphases, four

competing objectives dominate these data strategies:

innovation (using data to create new business models

and boost economic growth); security (ensuring that

sensitive data is not used by a hostile foreign power);

privacy (protecting citizens from abusive use of per-

sonal data); and surveillance (using data to monitor

and control citizens’ and companies’ behaviour).

In the past two years, China has been dening its

own data strategy and governance regime and, while

juggling the same four competing objectives as its

Western counterparts, is taking an innovative ap-

proach. While the specic data governance framework

is still being debated among scholars, policymakers,

industrial lobbyists and state institutions, local pilot

regulations on data and stakeholders’ public posi-

tions have already hinted at its future characteristics.

This Brief aims to shed light on these debates over

China’s emerging data governance framework. It

starts by describing the objectives of the framework,

Summary

› China’s data strategy creates risks of abu-

sive data collection on EU nationals and

companies and challenges the European

Union’s strong emphasis on individual data

rights. China’s data governance frame-

work also entails a risk of deepening data

protectionism, where countries hold on to

their data resources and do not share them

with foreign actors.

› As for other ‘factors of production’, such

as land, labour and capital, China has em-

barked on a process of carefully dening

property rights for data; these rights de-

pend on the type of stakeholder, the pur-

pose of usage and a granular categorisation

of data types.

› China’s data governance framework, as

discussed by policymakers and illus-

trated in local pilot schemes, emphasises

corporate data rights and state-led data

collection.



CAMILLE BOULLENOIS

then summarises the debates around the new data

rights that Chinese policymakers are establishing and

analyses China’s rst local pilot regulations dening

those rights. The Brief then focuses specically on

health data to illustrate how China’s

data governance regime is designed

to work. Finally, the Brief gives an

overview of the challenges that

China’s data governance framework

presents for EU governments and

companies. Ultimately, China’s data

governance regime will have impor-

tant implications for the protection

of EU citizens’ data and creates a

risk of data protectionism. It is

therefore crucial that the EU under-

stands early enough the direction that China is tak-

ing, so that it can respond appropriately.

UNLEASHING THE

POTENTIAL OF DATA

RESOURCES

As in many countries, the objectives of China’s

data governance policy have been evolving rapidly.

Originally more concerned with data security and us-

ing data as a tool for surveillance and control, the

Chinese government has in the past ve years built

a comprehensive data privacy protection regime and

established a strategy to create a data market encour-

aging innovation and digital economic growth.

The Chinese government has long pursued a

security-centred approach to data. Soon after the

country opened up to the internet in the 1990s, the

government took drastic steps to control access to the

Net with its infamous ‘Great Firewall’. In subsequent

decades, protecting the country’s cyber infrastruc-

ture and preventing cyberattacks and data leaks have

become key goals of China’s data governance system,

with regulations such as the 2017 Cybersecurity Law

and the 2021 Data Security Law.

Gaining an in-depth knowledge of its population for

governance purposes has also long been part of the

Chinese government’s strategy. The digital policing

‘Golden Shield’ project, started in 1998 and oper-

ated by the Ministry of Public Security, included the

establishment of a centralised criminal information

system. A police data system known as the Integrated

Joint Operations Platform later became infamous for

its role in mass surveillance and human rights viola-

tions in Xinjiang.

The objective of protecting individuals’ privacy, by

comparison, made its appearance more recently. It

was only in 2018 that China, following in the EU’s

footsteps and responding to citizens’ concerns, start-

ed to put in place a systematic le-

gal framework protecting data pri-

vacy, with the Personal Information

Security Specication (4) (a revised

version of which was released in

2020) and the urry of personal

information protection regulations

that followed, culminating in the

Personal Information Protection

Law (5) issued in August 2021.

The push to develop the digital

economy has also started to be integrated into China’s

data governance framework in the past ve years. In

2015, the State Council issued the Outline of Actions to

Promote Big Data Development (6), and the 13th ve-year

plan (7) issued in 2016 dedicated a whole chapter to the

national big data development strategy. Encouraging

the digital economy is important to the Chinese gov-

ernment for two reasons. First, China lags behind

Western countries in smart manufacturing and in-

dustrial digitalisation. China, for instance, spends

about six times less on IT as a proportion of gross

domestic product (GDP) than the United States and

three times less than Germany (8). China’s manufac-

turing is still largely low-tech, low-skilled and based

on cheap labour, and data is seen as crucial to in-

novation and economic upgrading. Second, China’s

fast-growing e-commerce market is exceptionally

strong, accounting for about 45 % of global transac-

tions in that sector (9), and Chinese leaders want to

capitalise on that strength.

To unleash the potential of data resources, the

Chinese government has embarked on an unprec-

edented approach with regard to data governance. In

October 2019, the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th

Central Committee of the Communist Party charac-

terised data as a ‘factor of production’ (10). This rec-

ognition paved the way for discussions about how to

create a state-led data market, which would boost

the digital economy by reducing transaction costs

and allowing a smoother circulation of data. In 2020,

an important State Council policy announced more

market-oriented allocation of factors of production,

including data (11).

Such a legal regime would have to balance the inter-

ests of three dierent stakeholders. Businesses, on

one side of the triangle, are seeking easy collection

of personal data; cheap, legal and fast access to data-

bases with accurate data; and protection of their data

from the government’s reach. They also seek oppor-

tunities to exchange data with other businesses and

to monetise data, low compliance costs for storing

and using databases, and the right to analyse and use

China’s data

governance

regime will

have important

implications for

the protection of

EU citizens’ data.



CHINA’S DATA STRATEGY | CREATING A STATELED MARKET

data to enhance their business models. On another

side of the triangle, individuals want restrictions on

data collection to better protect their privacy, and

they need guarantees that the data that companies

and governments hold on them will not be used to

harm or control them. On the third side of the trian-

gle, various government agencies, as in many coun-

tries around the world, are pushing for increasing

data collection on the population so that they can

better oversee and control citizens’ and companies’

behaviour. Governments also seek to arbitrate be-

tween corporate and individuals’ interests (12).

WHO WILL OWN

CHINA’S DATA?

A data market, like other sectors of the Chinese econ-

omy, is understood in a very specic way: under

China’s ‘socialist market economy’ (13), the govern-

ment has a signicant role in dening rights and

rules but recognises that letting players freely inter-

act within this state-dened framework is most ef-

cient. With this in mind, Chinese policymakers are

now starting to call for a legal system that creates

and denes data property rights, thus allowing data

to become a tradable commodity that can be bought

and sold on data trading platforms.

Creating a data ownership regime

is controversial. Data has unique

properties that make such an en-

deavour dicult: unlike tangible

goods, data can be reproduced and

disseminated at will. A creative and

original eort, which is often the

legal prerequisite for an object to

be recognised as 'intellectual prop-

erty', is not necessarily required to

assemble a database. After years of heated discus-

sions, the United States and the EU have not yet cre-

ated such a data ownership regime. While proponents

of the idea argue that it would create incentives to

generate and share data, critics contend that it would

stie the growth of the digital economy, hinder the

movement of data and accelerate data monopolisa-

tion (a process whereby a company acquires a domi-

nant position across multiple sectors as a result of its

capacity to hoard data on a very large scale) (14).

The topic is also contentious within China. As it is a

technical issue on which legislation is still in the early

stages, there is room for public discussion and disa-

greement, which have been expressed openly in aca-

demic and news articles. But there has been, over the

past two years, consistent and high-level support for

introducing data property rights. The 14th ve-year

plan released in March 2021 – a high-level roadmap

of the country’s development covering 2021–2025 –

called for ‘establishing and improving data proper-

ty rights transactions’ (15). The ninth meeting of the

Central Finance and Economics Committee in March

2021 once again called for ‘strengthening the con-

struction of the data property rights system’ (16).

Dening data ownership rights, according to pro-

ponents of this legislative eort, would have sev-

eral benets. It would encourage the circulation and

sharing of data and help eliminate barriers to data

usage. Companies would not be afraid to share data

if they knew property over it was protected by law

from appropriation and abusive copy. In addition,

it would lead to a better distribution of wealth and

benets derived from data usage, by enabling the es-

tablishment of a taxation system based on data as-

sets, for example. It could also break down natural

data monopolies and ensure fair market competition

by allowing smaller players to monetise their data

rather than losing it, or to buy data they need from

tech giants.

Although China’s data ownership regime is still in its

early stages, discussions among scholars, speeches

by policymakers and local legislation hint at what it

could look like. Most commentators agree that a data

ownership regime should allow for non-exclusivity

and multistakeholder joint ownership, with dier-

ent data subjects and data processors exercising dif-

ferent rights over data according to

their role in generating, maintain-

ing and using it.

Under this framework, individuals

have been granted substantive pro-

tection from harmful corporate data

practices, with privacy provisions

very similar to the EU’s general data

protection regulation (GDPR). But

Chinese experts and policymak-

ers also advocate a business-minded framework in

which data ownership rights sensu stricto would be re-

served to large databases held by businesses and not

extended to individuals’ personal data. This would

mean that individuals would not be able to monetise

or derive income from their personal information,

but they would enjoy ‘negative rights’, for example

the rights to refuse to grant authorisation to use their

information, to delete it, to access it or to rectify it.

By contrast, enterprises collecting data would enjoy

the rights to manage, use and derive income from

the data they held – under certain conditions. One

such condition is that the data collection either was

authorised by the individuals that the data concerns

(the data subjects) or responded to a limited set of

necessary business purposes. Alternatively, busi-

nesses can freely use the data they have collected as

Chinese

policymakers are

now starting to call

for a legal system that

creates and denes

data property rights.

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©EuropeanUnionInstituteforSecurityStudies,2021.Theviewsexpressedinthispublicationaresolelythoseoftheauthor(s)anddonotnecessarilyreflecttheviewsoftheEuropeanUnion.BRIEF/21Oct2021CHINA’SDATASTRATEGYCreatingastate-ledmarketbyCamilleBoullenoisProjectleader/HeadofBrusselsofficeatSinolyticsINTRODUCTIONIn2...

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