The paper analyzes three policy experiments aimed at advancing China’s data economy: data assetization, which enables data to be valued and traded as a financial assets; state-owned data exchanges, which provide platforms for the controlled marketization of data; and public data franchising, which grants select entities exclusive rights to commercialize government-held public data. These experiments seek to integrate fragmented local data markets into a unified national market, addressing China’s persistent data fragmentation across jurisdictions and sectors, also called the “data island” problem. While early progress is evident, significant challenges remain, including uneven data quality, weak demand for data products, limited interoperability among domestic data markets, emerging monopolistic tendencies in data franchising, and unresolved privacy and security risks.
Globally, China’s state-led data economy is often presented as an alternative to European Union and U.S. approaches to data governance, which tend to frame data governance primarily as a constraint on liberal markets rather than tools to support market construction and development. By examining China’s evolving data governance regime, this paper contributes to comparative debates on data governance and offers insights into why China’s approach may hold particular appeal in non-Western contexts, especially as emerging digital powers actively advance growth-centered political economies around data and AI.
