50 51 Compliance, an Inevitable Course to Data Assetization In the digital era, European and American countries have become aware of the critically significant role played by data factors in the industrial innovation and social development, and therefore have introduced a batch of support policies. In order to seize the opportunity of new technological revolution, China is not willing to be left behind in the global digitalization. Based on the information infrastructure built during the “13th Five-Year Plan” period, informatization and industrialization have become deeply integrated during the “14th Five-Year Plan” period. In this context, the enactment of the Data Security Act in 2021 officially kicked off the physical data governance. I. COMPLIANCE RUNS THROUGH THE LAYOUT OF DATA GOVERNANCE Early in 2020, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council of China issued the Opinions on Building a More Sound System and Mechanism for Market-oriented Allocation of Factors and other papers which consider data, the core factor of digitalization, and such other four factors as land, labor, capital and technology as the five major factors of production. In 2021, considered as the “first year of the data era”, the Data Security Act, the Act on the Protection of Personal Information and the Cyber-Safety Act jointly underpinned the data compliance and governance, and data governance became widely known by the public from the upper planning level. In 2022, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council of China issued the Opinions on Building a Basic Data System to Better Play the Role of Data Factor (“20 Opinions on Data”) which states that a data property right system should be established to facilitate data circulation and transaction and asset sedimentation. In the next six months, local data exchanges were established in China, and marketization of data factors swept across the country. However, one obstacle hindering to marketization of data factors needs to be overcome without delay is pricing. How the value of data should be defined? On August 21, 2023, the Ministry of Finance issued the Interim Provisions on Accounting Treatment of Enterprise Data Resources. In response, the China Appraisal Society soon issued the Guidelines on Data Asset Evaluation, with a view to finding solutions from different angles such as accounting treatment, accounting information disclosure, determination of form of assetization, and value evaluation. It can be learned from static compliance construction of data operators, dynamic data circulation and application, data sedimentation into reproducible resources and assets, and China’s overall policy path of promoting digitalization through data governance since the late period of the “13th Five-Year Plan” that in China, data governance is carried out in a well-prepared and prudent way, and is done resolutely by inter-linked steps. Regarding data governance in China, the ultimate goal is to stimulate the value of data by the approach to promote data circulation and application, and all steps involved in this process are inter-linked by data compliance governance. II. COMPLIANCE UNDERPINS THE CONFIRMATION OF RIGHTS: STIMULATING THE STARTING POINT OF THE VALUE OF DATA FACTOR It has been widely accepted that data can increase the value of other factors of production, but the direct path to realize its own value has long been up in the air. It can be learned from the above papers issued by the Ministry of Finance and China Appraisal Society that the value of data products (and even their raw materials) entering the market is easy to verify and accommodated by modern financial and accounting systems. Therefore, the use value, market value and asset value of data resources are unified in the financial and accounting system. CHAPTER 2
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