Guangdong published a program encouraging cities in the province to set up a Chief Data Officer system in May this year.

As stated in the program, the responsibilities of the chief data officer will cover four aspects: promoting the establishment of digital governance, coordinating data management and cross-sectoral innovation, exercising regularity guidance and supervision, and strengthening the construction of a talent pool.

In recent years, cities like Dongguan and Foshan which used to depend on manufacturing have been digitizing their economy. For example, Dongguan now has around one thousand emerging digital services corporations and a hundred-billion-sized digital economy. As planned, there will be more than 50 thousand enterprises over a designated size that complete digitization and 1 million joining in the digital industrial chain by 2025 in Guangdong.

According to China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the global volume of digital economy hit $31.8 trillion by 2020, while China took up $5.2 trillion, second to the US. The share of digital economy in GDP has also risen to 38.6%. It is estimated that the amount of investment in 5G will reach RMB 1.2 trillion between 2020 and 2025, with a promising economic output of RMB 10.6 trillion.

By 2019, Guangdong's data storage accounted for 20% of China’s national capacity. Guangzhou and Shenzhen respectively have trillion-yuan-sized digital economies.

On July 6, Shenzhen released a regulation for protecting personal data based on a principle called “inform and agree”.

The Regulation forbids over-collection of user data, coercive user authorization, illegal data sharing, and discriminatory pricing on users. Violators will face fines ranging from RMB 50 thousand to 500 thousand. If the case is serious, the fines for individual case will be under 5% of the annual turnover of the previous year, with a maximum of RMB 50 million.

Author | Abby, Jerry (intern)

Editor | Wing, Keane, Jerry, Steven