As the digital economy warms up, network security has moved to the centre of the policy agenda. This year’s government work report called for stronger network security, data security and personal information protection, and in the first Two Sessions since the Data Security Law and the Personal Information Protection Law took effect, attention turned to the security of digital space itself.
The deeper digital technology fuses with the economy and society, the bigger the attack surface. At the consumer level, face recognition and other biometrics bring convenience while collecting personal data beyond scope. In industry, attacks on production systems keep causing data leaks. And as countries build digital government, data security now touches national security directly.
The security of the digital foundation matters to everything built on it. Smart cities on IoT, big data platforms, cloud and information systems all need security considered across the full lifecycle — planning, construction, operations — with a system-level security framework rather than point fixes. Several proposals submitted this year addressed the field.
Upgrading the framing
Zhou Hongyi, founder of 360, proposed upgrading ‘network security’ to ‘digital security’: an emergency response and defence system covering every digitalised scenario, from industrial internet and connected vehicles to smart cities, cloud, data and supply-chain security. Regions should build security in from the start of digital construction, keep systems interconnected, and draw society into the work.
Yan Wangjia, chairwoman of Venustech, took aim at the east-west computing project itself: build ‘data-benefit’ infrastructure at city level to support it — city public data centres, data exchange and trading facilities, city-level security operations centres, data security governance facilities, disaster recovery centres, and secure cloud-network edge access.
On the metaverse, Tan Jianfeng of the Fifth Space Information Technology Research Institute warned that governance of virtual society — public opinion, transaction supervision, privacy, sovereignty — is still being worked out, and the metaverse will make each of these harder. Regulators should study the rules before the risks arrive.
Sector-specific gaps
Vertical industries are spawning new business models that need matched security regulation. In connected vehicles, Tan Minqiang, chief engineer at Dongfeng Motor, proposed cross-department and cross-industry coordination to build standardised vehicle information security, standards and supervision systems.
In consumer life, the last mile of personal data security includes what happens when devices die. Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi, proposed tightening personal information handling across the electronics recycling chain, so that data protection and recycling rates rise together.
Data is now a factor of production, and turning a security liability into a resource is the harder problem. Xiao Gang, a former chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, noted that China holds vast data but little of it is genuinely opened, shared or used; the tension between data security, privacy and full utilisation needs coordinated treatment.
The focus has shifted from the security of networked physical space to the security of digital space, and that shift is structural, not cyclical. Meeting it takes the industry working together — which is what will carry the digital economy’s growth.
Republished for information. The original text has not been independently verified and does not necessarily reflect our views.
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