Seven government ministries and agencies, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Commerce, the State Administration for Market Regulation, and the National Data Administration, have jointly issued a three-year action plan.
The plan, titled the Action Plan for Promoting Collaborative Development of Large, Medium, and Small Enterprises in the Platform Economy (2026-2028), outlines key tasks and special initiatives focusing on three core areas: strengthening innovation-driven collaboration, improving ecosystem synergy, and deepening open collaboration.
The plan aims to actively break down barriers, promote openness, and enhance coordination to build a more equitable, dynamic, and sustainable development system for the platform economy.
Key Development Period
Authorities stated that China's platform economy is currently at a critical juncture of transformation and upgrading. There is an urgent need to align with the new circumstances and requirements of the upcoming 15th Five-Year Plan period for socio-economic development and technological-industrial transformation, to foster collaborative development among enterprises of all sizes, and to accelerate the construction of an innovative, integrated, healthy, and efficient development ecosystem.
An analysis from a leading research institute noted that this action plan is a significant measure at the national level to propel the platform economy towards high-quality development as the 15th Five-Year Plan begins. It signifies that China's platform economy is entering a new stage of diversified and collaborative development.
The framework built around innovation, ecosystem, and openness represents a clear strategic move to tackle collaborative challenges and address industry constraints from an institutional perspective. It is also a long-term strategy to further solidify the foundation for digital and intelligent development and activate new growth drivers.
Three-Year Objectives Defined
The platform economy, characterized by internet platforms hosting a symbiotic relationship between large and small enterprises, plays a crucial role in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, driving industrial upgrading, and cultivating new growth drivers.
In recent years, the state has introduced a series of measures to continuously improve the governance system of the platform economy, explicitly supporting platform enterprises in leading development, creating employment, and competing internationally. The outline for the 15th Five-Year Plan further makes important arrangements regarding "promoting innovation and healthy development of the platform economy" and "facilitating win-win development for platform enterprises, operators within platforms, and workers."
Analysis indicates that the platform economy is a vital force in optimizing resource allocation and supporting economic and social development in the digital era. Accelerating its development relates not only to the immediate needs of expanding domestic demand, stabilizing employment, and benefiting people's livelihoods but also to the long-term layout of empowering the real economy and cultivating new quality productive forces.
While the platform economy's reach has continuously expanded and its integration has deepened in recent years, playing a positive role in connecting supply and demand, driving transformation, and promoting employment, challenges such as insufficient industry collaboration, uneven enterprise development, and inefficient factor flow have become increasingly prominent.
The Action Plan sets a goal for 2028 to significantly enhance the level of collaborative development among enterprises of all sizes in the platform economy. It aims to establish a number of replicable and scalable collaborative innovation models and cultivate a group of manufacturing champion enterprises in the platform economy sector.
The plan targets increased openness and sharing of factors like technology and data, with the release of three batches of platform openness lists and the selection of no less than 100 pilot projects for open platform resource scenarios. It also envisions the accelerated emergence of new technologies, applications, models, and business formats in the platform economy, aiming to build no less than 10 service platforms and 60 implementable intelligent service application scenarios.
Three Major Focus Areas
To achieve the goal of significantly improving collaborative development, the Action Plan proposes work measures in three areas: strengthening innovation-driven collaboration, improving ecosystem synergy, and deepening open collaboration and linkage.
Analysis points out that the platform economy exhibits typical two-sided market characteristics. Large platform enterprises are at the core of the ecosystem, representing the "critical few" that control technology, data, and rules, while the vast number of small and medium-sized merchants, service providers, and consumers constitute the "vast majority" forming the ecosystem's base. How to properly handle the relationship between the "few" and the "many" is a mandatory question for promoting high-quality development of the platform economy.
By perfecting the top-level design for collaborative development and establishing long-term mechanisms for risk-sharing and benefit-sharing, the plan aims to promote complementary advantages and win-win cooperation. This is a crucial step to further activate the system's endogenous momentum and achieve long-term development.
The Action Plan specifies the launch of a collaborative innovation leadership initiative. This involves accelerating the cultivation of diverse innovation entities, encouraging stronger innovation cooperation between large and small enterprises, enhancing capabilities in technological, industrial, and service innovation, improving the innovation development guarantee system, and bolstering new momentum for platform economy growth.
Placing "innovation collaboration" at the forefront is seen as aiming to address the challenge of uncoordinated innovation development among enterprises of different sizes. It leverages the technological advantages of large platforms, forming innovation consortia with small and medium-sized enterprises to reduce innovation costs for SMEs and empower them with scientific and technological achievements.
It supports platform enterprises in collaborating with SMEs to focus on emerging and future industries. By promoting large-scale application demonstrations of new technologies, products, and scenarios, the plan aims to create internationally competitive advanced manufacturing clusters and innovative industrial clusters, cultivate future industry chains, build advanced technology systems, and thereby drive the deep integration of the real economy and the digital economy.
Building a Four-in-One Ecosystem
Regarding ecosystem synergy, the Action Plan proposes constructing a four-in-one ecosystem synergy system encompassing compliance, industry, services, and global expansion. This aims to foster two-way empowerment between platforms and small and medium-sized entities within the ecosystem.
Focusing on core pain points such as algorithm transparency, traffic governance, and "involution-style" competition, the plan pushes platforms to improve their compliance governance systems, establish consultation mechanisms with small and medium-sized entities for major matters, and alleviate burdens on SMEs through reasonable fee reductions and profit concessions.
Simultaneously, it reinforces platforms' responsibility for source governance, purifies the ecosystem in industries like live-streaming e-commerce, cracks down on counterfeit and shoddy products, and effectively protects consumer rights.
The Action Plan also specifies the launch of an open collaboration expansion initiative. This involves accelerating the formulation of platform openness lists, guiding platform enterprises to speed up the open sharing of factors like technology, data, and computing power with SMEs, establishing public service platforms for SMEs, and building a new development landscape for the platform economy.
Unlocking the Flow of Resources
Openness is a natural attribute of the platform economy, but questions of "what to open, to whom, and how" have long been deep-seated issues hindering collaboration between large and small enterprises. Leading platform companies have amassed vast data, advanced algorithms, and ample computing power, but these resources are mostly used in internal cycles. A normalized, low-cost open mechanism has not yet been formed, making it difficult to fully unleash the multiplier effect of data as a factor of production. Breaking down data silos and facilitating the flow of factors has become an urgent task for deepening open collaboration in the platform economy.
The Action Plan aims to dismantle barriers to factor flow from three levels. First, making resources "visible" by organizing platform enterprises to compile and regularly publish openness lists, clarifying the scope and rules for opening up technology interfaces, data resources, application scenarios, and experimental facilities, so that SMEs can clearly understand the technical capabilities and data resources available to them.
Second, making resources "usable" by constructing a public service platform for collaborative development, providing integrated services for professional resource matching and precise demand alignment to all parties. Third, making resources "flow" by promoting the integrated and coordinated opening of technological capabilities, data elements, and computing resources, forming a complete closed loop from lowering innovation barriers to optimizing factor allocation. This allows resources to truly circulate within the platform ecosystem, releasing their multiplier effect.
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