China’s digital economy major driver of 2022 growth, Beijing pledges to seize the opportunity

The internet-based economy was China’s biggest growth driver among its new economic engines last year, official data showed, highlighting Beijing’s push for the digital economy to take over from traditional tools and drive the post-Covid recovery.

The New Kinetic Energy Index of China’s Economic Development, which reflects economic momentum by measuring the trend of new industries and business models, stood at 766.8 in 2022 – compared to a base of 100 in 2014 – after increasing by 28.4 per cent from the previous year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Tuesday.

The subindex for the network economy, which measures the number of internet users, the amount of internet traffic as well as e-commerce transactions, increased by 39.6 per cent compared to 2021 to 2,739, accounting for 91.6 per cent of the overall growth.

According to a report released in April by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the value of China’s digital economy reached 50.2 trillion yuan (US$6.9 trillion) last year, accounting for 41.5 per cent of the national economic output and ranking second globally only after the United States.

As of the end of 2022, the number of mobile internet users in China had reached 1.46 billion, an increase of 3 per cent from 2021.

Mobile internet access traffic, meanwhile, increased by 18.1 per cent year-on-year to 261.76 billion gigabytes, according to the NBS.

The transaction volume for China’s e-commerce platforms in 2022 stood at 43.8 trillion yuan, representing a year-on-year increase of 3.5 per cent, while 80.7 per cent of traditional offline consumption could now potentially be replaced by online shopping.