Introduction:

The Blue Book analyzes the current digital economy, and predicts its overall development during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) period. It studies development of the digital economy, digital economy governance, digital economy security, digitization, and the relationship between digitization and globalization. Standing at the frontier of contemporary Chinese digital economic research, the Blue Book provides a comprehensive and valuable reference for academia, industry leaders, and decision-making departments to interpret the digital economy. It calculates the scale of China’s digital economy over the past few years, based on calculations of the added value of digital sectors and calculations of digital technology’s contributions to the added value of other sectors. The results show that in 2020, the scale of China’s digital economy exceeded RMB 19 trillion, accounting for about 18.8% of the country’s GDP.