HUANG Danyang: Developing a “Chinese Approach” to Statistical Monitoring of Consumption in the Digital Intelligence Era

The Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China made systematic arrangements for economic and social development during the 15th Five-Year Plan period.It made clear the need to uphold the strategic basis of expanding domestic demand and to comprehensively advance the empowerment of digital and intelligent technologies, while strengthening the integration of artificial intelligence with industrial development, people’s livelihood security, social governance and other fields. Consumption serves as a critical link between the macro economy and people's daily lives. Boosting consumption is not only a powerful measure for expanding domestic demand, but also a key scenario for creating an intelligent and better life in the digital age.

Entering the 15th Five-Year Plan period, service consumption has grown rapidly, integrated consumption scenarios have kept expanding, and new scenarios and business forms are emerging one after another. In the face of increasingly diverse, dynamic, and integrated consumption patterns, how to perceive consumption trends and track macroeconomic performance in a more timely, accurate, and comprehensive manner  has become a fundamental task in advancing Chinese modernization.

Against this backdrop, micro-level data represented by mobile payments offer a unique lens through which to observe the operation of China’s ultra-large-scale market.China is among the global leaders in mobile payment penetration, and mobile payment transactions have been deeply embedded in residents’ daily lives and business operations of market entities. Every individual consumption transaction, every merchant and every consumption scenario records the pulse of economic activities at the micro level. Identifying macroeconomic trends from micro transactions, capturing structural shifts from individual behaviors, and extracting governance-related insights from market activities represent new challenges for macroeconomic monitoring in the digital intelligence era. This constitutes a distinctive advantage cultivated in China’s pursuit of Chinese modernization, as well as a data foundation that cannot be easily replicated by other countries.

The crux lies in how to convert these scattered microeconomic data across the market into public capacity that serves macro decision-making. This necessitates continuous efforts to shift statistical monitoring from the traditional standardized data collection from individual entities toward ecosystem-based data aggregation centered on platforms. On the premise of security and compliance, we shall comprehensively adopt artificial intelligence technologies, multi-source data fusion approaches, privacy-preserving algorithms and other tools to build a consumption monitoring system featuring higher frequency, refined segmentation, dynamism and intelligence. This is not a mere application of technology, but an in-depth integration of social science issues and artificial intelligence technologies. On the one hand, we need to understand consumption behaviors, industrial structures and policy transmission mechanisms; on the other hand, we must leverage models, algorithms and computing power to transform massive volumes of micro data into interpretable, verifiable macroeconomic information that can support decision-making.

Explorations of this kind represent concrete practices of integrating “data factors with government statistics”. On the one hand, they enable timelier tracking of consumption dynamics and identification of shifts in service consumption and emerging business formats. On the other hand, they deliver more targeted support for policy analysis and assessment, furnishing data backing for expanding domestic demand, boosting service consumption and fostering new growth drivers. Meanwhile, the presentation of more authoritative, timely and granular data also helps stabilize public expectations and bolster consumer confidence.

At a deeper level, leveraging microdata to underpin macro monitoring embodies the advancement of modernizing national governance empowered by digital and intelligent technologies. It integrates China’s strengths in its ultra-large-scale market, mature mobile payment infrastructure, data factor resources, and artificial intelligence technologies to bolster government governance and policy responsiveness. This also represents an interdisciplinary integrated Chinese practice: social sciences frame research questions, statistical methodologies bridge micro and macro dimensions, artificial intelligence boosts analytical capacity, and governance demands drive the practical application of technologies.

Looking ahead, the expansion of domestic demand and the pursuit of high-quality development during the 15th Five-Year Plan period are expected to serve as key drivers for further refining a data governance mechanism that features multi-stakeholder coordination, security and compliance, and clearly defined rights and responsibilities. This will facilitate the formation of a new paradigm for modern consumption statistics that is sustainable, replicable, and scalable. Leveraging China's unique micro-level data foundation and the extensive application scenarios of digital and intelligent technologies, we are well-positioned to pioneer a “Chinese approach” to consumption statistics amid global digital-intelligent economic growth, delivering more robust data and governance support for advancing Chinese modernization.