Shanghai expands scope of virtual asset trading to become a ‘data industry innovation highland’ worth US$69 billion by 2025 | South China Morning Post

Posted on August 22, 2023 by Design in Design Innovation | 0 Comments

Expansion of the Shanghai Data Exchange underscores China’s efforts to step up development of digital trade, a segment that has become an integral part of the economy under the country’s 14th five-year plan for 2021 to 2025.

China is trying to apply commercial rules to create a market for data, which is regarded by Beijing as a new production factor, in the same category as land, capital, human labour and technology.

These exchanges are expected to address thorny issues such as how to classify, set a price and trade valuable data made available by companies.

In May, the state-backed Guiyang Global Big Data Exchange – the country’s first data exchange that began operations as early as 2015 – facilitated the country’s first sale of personal data, according to the provincial government of Guizhou in southwest China.

Meanwhile in Shanghai, “all kinds of entities” are encouraged to buy data products through the city’s data exchange, according to the municipal government. It indicated that those which meet certain conditions can be entitled to tax deduction for their research and development expenses.

While other regulators around the world, including those in mainland China, have been clamping down on online assets, authorities in Hong Kong have put in a place a new regulatory regime that boosts development of its virtual-assets industry.

Shanghai’s digital economy plan would also ramp up the development of artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies, which are relevant to the analysis, research and application of data, according to the municipal government.

Other developments to be pursued include “innovations such as blockchain-linked chips and operating systems, and the application of key technologies such as 6G and quantum communications”.

By 2025, the total scale of Shanghai’s computing power network will “quadruple from the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan”, which concluded in 2020, according to the municipal government.