China's New Infrastructure Construction: Concepts, Current Situations and Problems

This paper reviews the statements of new infrastructure construction made by the Chinese Central Government on several important conferences, and sorts out several typical interpretations on new infrastructure construction, with various focuses on "seven major fields", "three aspects", "new technology drive" and "new elements". It is pointed out that the scope of "new infrastructure" can be defined in broad and narrow senses. The one in the narrow sense mainly includes six areas:5 G network, artificial intelligence, industrial internet, internet of things, data center and charging pile; while the one in the broad sense includes not only those in the narrow sense, but also the transformation and upgrading of traditional infrastructure by using the new generation of information technologies, that is, the digital transformation of traditional infrastructure. Based on literature reviews and news reports, this paper holds that the current investment scale of new infrastructure construction (in the narrow sense) in China is about 1 trillion yuan RMB, accounting for 1.8% of the total fixed asset investment of the whole society; it is expected that its total investment scale will reach 10 trillion yuan RMB in the next five years. Despite its huge scale, there still remains some problems that cannot be ignored in the current development, mainly the lack of key core technical capacity, risks of uncertain technical routes, network and information security issues, poor investment and financing mechanism and structural imbalance. In the future, the comprehensive use of policies concerning industry, finance, technological innovation, regulation, and fiscal policy, is needed to promote the high-quality development of new infrastructure. Industrial policies should be transformed from supporting the development of specific enterprises to constructing a safe industrial ecology and enriching service scenes; fiscal ones should focus on giving full play to the guiding role of fiscal capital and optimizing the structure of fiscal capital expenditure; financing ones should focus on attracting more social capital to participate and construct a diversified financing system; technological innovation ones should support the key core technologies and promote the construction of a cooperative innovation system combining "government, company, university, research institute and application"; regulatory policies should adhere to the principle of "inclusiveness and prudence" and promote the construction of national quality infrastructure construction.