China premier balks at US blacklist with visit to sanctioned surveillance giant, calls for digital economy revolution
- Li Qiang’s inspection tour in China’s economic powerhouse features some of the strongest high-level calls for a digital transformation, with huge hardware and software upgrades in the works
- China expects its collective computational power to increase 52 per cent by 2025
During a weekend visit to eastern China’s hi-tech firms – including one blacklisted by the United States – Premier Li Qiang coaxed industry players to pace up their digital transformations while generating new growth momentum.
“There’s a promising future for the digital economy. The company should strive for core technological breakthroughs and, as an industry leader, grow together with smaller industry players,” he was quoted as saying, using a term that roughly includes all economic activities that depend on, or are enabled by, digital technologies.
The trip was made as the world’s second-largest economy shifts its focus from quantity to quality but faces rising containment efforts from the US and its allies in many hi-tech fields, including export controls on some key equipment.
Hikvision, the world’s largest maker of security cameras, has been on Washington’s “entity list” since 2019 for spying fears and Beijing’s alleged treatment of Uygur Muslims and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities. Five of its subsidiaries in Xinjiang were added to the blacklist earlier this year for “human rights violations and abuses” in the region, according to US commerce authorities.
