From Smart City to Smart Society: China's Journey Towards Essential Urban-Rural Transformation

As an economic superpower in the world, China has always been seeking new ways to enhance living environment and improve life equality of its residents. China has thus made substantial progress in the development of smart city with over 700 pilot projects launched over the last decade. However, these smart city pilot projects mainly cover urban areas in China, excluding nearly 600 million Chinese residents living in rural areas. Consequently, the Chinese government proposed the new concept of smart society in 2017 as the next generation of smart city initiative, with the aim of enhancing living standard of residents in not just urban but also rural areas. In this paper, we elaborate the concept and vision of smart society, and present and discuss a variety of issues concerning the transformation from smart city to smart society in China, including cross-departmental coordination, public awareness and participation, and information security and privacy. We conclude the paper by recommended that China’s strategy of smart society development can be considered and potentially adopted by other developing countries with similar contexts and urban-rural issues.