The Opinions of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on Building a Data  Foundation System to Give Better Play to the Role of Data Elements was officially released a few days ago. Taking the promotion of data compliance and efficient circulation and use, enabling the real economy as the main line, and focusing on data property rights, circulation transactions, income distribution, and security governance, China made a comprehensive deployment to accelerate the construction of data foundation system.

As a new production factor, data has characteristics of intangibility and non-consumption, which can be copied infinitely close to zero cost. It poses new challenges to traditional property rights, circulation, distribution, governance and other systems. It is urgent to build production relations that adapt to the development of digital productivity, and constantly liberate and develop digital productivity.

China attaches great importance to the role of data as the basic resource and innovation engine of new production factors, makes major deployments around the implementation of network power strategy and big data strategy, accelerates the construction of digital economy, digital society and digital government, and drives the transformation of production mode, lifestyle and governance mode with digital transformation as a whole. At the same time, the construction of the data element market in China is still in the initial stage, and it is urgent to explore and build a new production relationship and system of rules suitable for the characteristics of data elements.

The construction of data infrastructure is related to the overall situation of national development and security. As one of the symbolic, overall and strategic actions for China's reform and opening up to the outside world in the new era, building a data foundation system is conducive to giving full play to the role of data elements, strengthening and optimizing the digital economy, forming new advantages in international competition, and promoting high-quality development. It is also good for the overall distribution of efficiency and fairness, promoting the sharing of the development dividend of the digital economy by the whole people, and advancing the realization of common prosperity. By improving the governance efficiency of data elements, it will help the modernization of national governance system and governance capacity.

The key to building a data foundation system is to set four systems. The first is to build a data property system that ensures rights and interests and uses in compliance with regulations, promote the structural separation and orderly circulation of data property rights, push forward data classification, grading, confirmation, authorization, use, and market-oriented circulation and transaction, improve the data element rights protection system, and gradually form a data property system with Chinese characteristics. The second is to build a compliant and efficient data element circulation and transaction system that combines both inside and outside the market, and build a data element market system that adapts to China's institutional advantages from the aspects of rules, market, ecology, and cross-border. The third is to build a data element income distribution system reflecting efficiency and promoting fairness. In the initial distribution stage, according to the principle of "who invests, who contributes, who benefits", the data element income should be reasonably inclined to the creators of data value and use value. In the second and third distribution stages, focus on public interests and relatively vulnerable groups, prevent and regulate various risks and challenges such as sprawling expansion of capital in the data field that forms market monopoly. The fourth is to build a safe, controllable, flexible and inclusive data element governance system, and develop a governance model of government, enterprise, and society.

The core of building a data foundation system is the governance of data elements with Chinese characteristics. Data confirmation is a worldwide problem. In the process of data production, circulation and use, different subjects have different interests and demands for data, and they are characterized by complex symbiosis, interdependence and dynamic change. The traditional rights system framework is difficult to break through the data property dilemma. To this end, The Opinions innovate concepts of data property rights, dilute the ownership, emphasize the right to use data, focus on the circulation of the right to use data, creatively propose to establish a data property rights institutional framework featuring the division of the ownership of data resources, the right to use data processing and the right to management of data products, and build a data property rights institutional system with Chinese characteristics.

China has a large scale of data resources and rich application scenarios. By systematically constructing the data foundation system, it will effectively break institutional barriers to the supply, circulation and use of data elements, which has a positive and far-reaching impact on China’s in-depth promotion of digital development and the market-oriented allocation reform of data elements, and help to give full play to the basic role and new engine function of data elements.