By making reasonable use of big data, the government can strengthen its ability to make decisions, identify social problems and improve procedures, thereby boosting the development of smart cities.

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More than 200 scholars, government officials and entrepreneurs recently gathered in Nanjing, capital of East China’s Jiangsu Province, to discuss the role that big data plays in social and state governance.

The 2018 Nanjing Think Tank Summit on Internet Big Data and Social Governance was held on Jan. 27. Attendees focused on such topics as the trends and prospects of internet development as well as how internet and big data can be applied to social governance.

In 2017, big data was applied to a range of real-world situations in China while “cloud governance” based on big data emerged as a new model of social governance.
Tang Xujun, director of the New Media Research Center at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), noted that in the past year, Chinese internet users have expressed optimism about the future.

Highly educated young people constituted the principal force paying attention to social ideological trends, Tang said. The internet, particularly social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat, was the major channel by which the public acquired and communicated information.

“We should accurately size up changes in ethos through real-time analysis of big data to enhance social governance capacities and create a “digital China and smart society,’” Tang said.

“In today’s world, modern information technologies like big data and cloud computing have revolutionized the way people think, produce, live and learn, while bringing new opportunities to social governance,” said Huang Chuxin, head of the Media Development Research Center at the Institute of Journalism and Communication Studies under CASS.

By making reasonable use of big data, the government can strengthen its ability to make decisions, identify social problems and improve procedures, thereby boosting the development of smart cities, Huang said.

A city equipped with cloud computing and big data is three-dimensional, and the urban environment they bring about will achieve online and offline interaction, thereby promoting common progress of industries and attaining the goal of smart city management, Huang said.

In addition, Huang stressed the importance of intensifying big data management, adding that internet enterprises, which hold most data concerning state interests and national security, are obliged to ensure the safety of the data.

Participants in the summit reached consensus on a range of issues and released the Nanjing Initiative. According to the initiative, big data on the internet have become important resources for state governance, complementing data from the real economy and social research.

Meanwhile, it is necessary to remove data barriers between the government and enterprises to realize effective sharing and join forces to make China a country of innovators, according to the initiative.

During the meeting, a laboratory on big data of social governance, which was built jointly by People’s Daily Online, internet giant Tencent and the Institute of Journalism and Communication Studies at CASS, was unveiled. The lab will help to fully realize the advantages of each party in resources and technology, and it has committed to launching creative projects on public opinion research and judgment, physical health studies, and so on.

The summit was co-hosted by People’s Daily Online, the New Media Research Center at CASS and the Publicity Department of the CPC Nanjing Municipal Committee.

 

 

(edited by YU HUI)