As the PRC shifts towards tech‑led growth, its 1.4 billion people and more than 400 million middle‑income earners provide huge demand and real-world settings for new apps. For policymakers, widely applying technology to society has two-fold benefits: expanding services while boosting consumption.
China has a huge market with a multitude of real-world applications for new tech. To make the most of this, the country needs to create a positive cycle: new technology leads to better industries, which then improve people’s lives. According to Zhang Rong 张荣 Chinese Academy of Sciences academician, technology should focus on making services better, using resources more efficiently, and promoting fairness for everyone.
aged care
Beijing envisions the smart aged care industry achieving economies of scale to help compensate for the loss of caregivers.
chart 1:2020–25 China smart elderly care
From 2017, two action plans to develop smart health and aged-care industries were issued consecutively from 2017–20 and 2021–25. In 2019, Beijing issued a medium to long-term plan requiring greater innovation to address ageing, positioning tech innovation as the ‘primary driver and strategic pillar’ for responding to issues in the ageing population. 2024–25 saw a surge in the use of tech to advance aged care. Opinions on developing the silver economy include improving smart health and aged care products and services. Beijing plans to combine information tech, mobile devices, wearable equipment, service robots and other smart devices (e.g. smart wheelchairs and care beds) across home-based, community and residential aged care settings.
Soon after, Opinions on deepening reform in aged care services were issued. To speed up aged care tech and applications, Beijing calls for a focus on R&D, including humanoid robots, brain-computer interfaces and AI. As well as promoting smart home systems and smart health products, it aims to improve the national aged care information platform to align supply and demand for services, and to set up a unified database of older people and aged care services.
In line with the 2023 ‘Robot +’ implementation plan, MIIT and MCA issued a notice in June 2025 pairing R&D with pilots for intelligent service robots. A list of encouraged use-cases covers mobility support, smart beds with disinfection and toileting, smart bath machines, turning and feeding assistance, emotional companionship, reminders, health monitoring and early warning, and cognitive training.
Building on these advancements in intelligent and connected care, MoHURD (the Ministry of Housing and Rural Development) has released a list of model application cases for ‘digital homes,’ showcasing initiatives such as the installation of ‘one-button help’ systems for elderly residents living alone in Zhejiang. Meanwhile, MIIT (the Ministry of Information and Technology) published a promotion catalogue featuring smart health and aged care products, including public physical health testing machines and fall detection devices. In addition, Beijing is encouraging companies to apply for inclusion on its list of high-tech, innovative products and services designed for the elderly and disabled.
chart 2: 2020–25 China elderly care robots
health information sharing
Integrating tech into healthcare is nothing new; in addition to speeding up brain-computer interface development and incorporating DeepSeek into public hospitals, effective sharing of medical information can help address what PRC healthcare needs most: lowering costs while improving quality and access. To reduce the administrative burden on patients, who often must queue repeatedly for the same physical examinations because hospitals do not mutually recognise each other’s test data, the NHSA (National Health Security Administration) promoted the mutual recognition of medical institution examination results as early as February 2022.
A September 2025 Implementation plan calls for broader use of e‑prescriptions and cross‑regional sharing of immunisation and medication records, and urges county‑level providers to roll out digital immunisation clinics, intelligent diagnostic assistance in radiology, ECG and pathology, and test AI‑supported primary‑care diagnosis for common and chronic diseases.
Soon after, Guiding opinions on primary‑level chronic disease management pressed for tighter data links within medical consortia, requiring higher‑level hospitals to share data with primary care and to integrate clinical and public‑health information. They also encourage wider use of AI‑assisted tools to manage residents’ electronic health records.
20 provinces had deployed medical insurance imaging clouds, while an NHC November press conference reported that ‘AI+’ support helped 80 percent of counties set up shared centres for imaging, ECG and lab testing by October 2025. Remote imaging services exceeded 68 million county‑level consultations in 2025, and 360 cities were mutually recognising more than 200 categories of test results.
Yet doctors note that large file sizes, uneven image quality and incompatible systems still hamper cross‑hospital access. Local platforms often keep only three months of images due to cost, undermining long‑term follow‑up for chronic and tumour patients, while non‑standardised equipment at the grassroots produces inconsistent imaging.
education digitisation
In education, Beijing has gone beyond simply joining the AI bandwagon, promoting national digital resource sharing since 2019. Digitisation sped up in the 2020s: ‘education digitisation’ entered the 20th Party Congress report, and in 2024, MoE launched a national smart education platform pilot for K–12 in eight mainly minority and under‑resourced provinces. The pilots run in Guangdong, Hainan and central‑western minority areas, while eastern regions focus on sharing high‑quality digital content, laying a base for AI+ education nationwide.
Recognising that technology alone cannot transform education, MoE has prioritised teacher development to address the ongoing issue of overstretched educators. A 7 July 2025, plan empowering teachers through digital skills lays out a broad framework to improve teachers’ digital literacy and support the integration of AI tools into daily teaching. Through large-scale training programs and access to quality digital resources, the plan seeks to cultivate a workforce capable of delivering personalised, human–computer collaborative teaching.
tech isn’t everything
Despite major hardware gains—MoE reports full internet coverage across K–12 schools nationwide by 2023—the ‘software’ side still lags. Many teachers struggle to keep up with fast‑moving tools, seeing them as an added burden on already heavy workloads, warns Zheng Yonghe 郑永和 Beijing Normal University’s School of Scientific Education.
Current intelligent systems remain geared to storing and matching data, making it hard to recognise students’ original ideas, argues Xu Zheng 徐政 Jiangsu Party School. When students’ solutions diverge from responses expected by the system, teachers often default to machine judgments even when student thinking is sound, a practice that Xu fears is dampening creativity.
Digital healthcare faces parallel governance gaps. The absence of specialised national digital healthcare legislation and related health data laws means digital healthcare practice relies heavily on internet pharmaceutical legislation and numerous health policy ‘soft laws’, pointed out Yan Yingchuan 燕颖川 Guangdong Medical University School of Humanities and Management.
These fragmented norms carry limited authority and vary by region, making them ill‑suited to fast‑changing digital practice. Frequent data leaks and misuse erode doctor–patient trust. Strengthening statutory frameworks for digital healthcare is now urgent, she said, to protect patients’ rights and build a more resilient foundation for future growth.
next step: ‘software’
Taken together, these moves show Beijing trying to turn sheer market scale into a testing ground for tech‑driven public services across health, aged care and education. By pushing robots into care homes, AI into clinics and digital platforms into classrooms, policymakers hope to ease fiscal pressure while narrowing gaps between regions and social groups. Whether that promise is realised will depend less on hardware than on governance, standards and genuine human uptake—on whether systems are built to amplify professional judgment and citizens’ agency, rather than to simply digitise old problems in new forms.
tech experts
Wu Shizhong 吴世忠 | Chinese Academy of Engineering academician
Despite growing data volumes in hospitals, quality remains poor, ‘data silos’ persist, and collaboration is insufficient, requiring all round breakthroughs.
As for security issues, development and safety must be balanced through strengthened assurance systems. Software should be the cybersecurity focus, ensuring system stability and reliability. Medical data protection must prevent privacy breaches whilst enabling research collaboration. Security awareness requires enhancement through regular training, safety culture development, emergency drills and reminder mechanisms.
Finally, lawful management must balance technology and governance. Digital healthcare and security technologies should ensure AI development and safety. Priority must be given to researching new technology security risks whilst strictly observing regulations, technical standards and industry norms to ensure AI application safety.
Wu is a cybersecurity expert and a Chinese Academy of Engineering Academician. He holds a doctorate in engineering and a bachelor’s degree from East China Normal University. Specialising in information security testing and assurance systems, he previously served as Deputy Director of China’s National Secrecy Bureau, led over ten national standards and major research projects, earning recognition as a key driver of China’s information security advancement.
Gao Chengyun 高成运 | China Research Centre on Ageing director
Regarding elder guardianship challenges, Gao believes blockchain technology can create tamper-resistant platforms requiring appointed guardians to apply and transact through the system when disposing of property, fundamentally resolving trust issues through rules. Future possibilities include setting up digital credit archives for wards, integrating judicial records, financial credit and service evaluations, using AI for comprehensive assessment and risk alerts to assist guardian decisions.
AI enables round-the-clock monitoring of wards through smart home or wearable sensors whilst assisting in checking that guardians are fulfilling their duties. Cognitive assessment tools can identify decline earlier than family members through long-term data tracking, providing timely decision support.
However, data privacy and technology ethics require legal and technical resolution. Gao emphasised that AI only assists and cannot replace people. With technology’s help, appointed guardianship can upgrade from relying on personal relationships and moral self-discipline to a data-driven, rule-transparent, supervision-capable, systematic solution.
Gao is Director of the China Research Centre on Ageing and chair of the National Health Service Standardisation Technical Committee. His career focuses on ageing science and the standardisation of health services. He has worked with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the National Ageing Office, and the China National Committee on Ageing, contributing to the drafting of several ageing policies and planning documents. He regularly speaks on topics related to addressing population ageing and advancing elderly education.
Couldn't agree more. Zhang Rong's point about tech promoting fairness is particularly salient for equitable societal developpment.