China elevates ‘intelligent economy’ and AI+ in 2026 work report

By elevating “intelligent economy” to a headline concept in the 2026 Government Work Report and explicitly tying it to an expanded “AI+” campaign, Beijing is signalling that AI is no longer a supporting technology but a core economic paradigm. The language goes beyond generic digital transformation: it calls out intelligent terminals, intelligent agents, and embodied intelligence as engines of large-scale commercialization, and links them to new infrastructure like massive compute clusters, 5G/industrial internet and satellite internet.([m.sfccn.com](https://m.sfccn.com/2026/3-6/2MMDE1MzJfMjExMzQ2MQ.html))

For the race to AGI, this matters less as a semantic tweak and more as a budgeting and policy pointer. In China’s system, phrases in the work report translate into multi-year funding, local implementation targets and industrial policy. Expect more subsidies for data centers, humanoid robots, autonomous vehicles and AI-native service sectors, plus continued support for domestic foundation models and open-source ecosystems highlighted by figures like Kai-Fu Lee.([mrjjxw.com](https://www.mrjjxw.com/articles/2026-03-05/4281116.html?utm_source=openai)) This could further compress the gap between Chinese and US firms in embodied and agentic AI, even if US labs remain ahead on frontier model benchmarks. For global players, it raises the bar: competing with Chinese firms will increasingly mean competing against an integrated, policy-backed “intelligent economy,” not just individual startups.