In recent years, digital economy is an important driving force for Chinese modernization, and the policy deployment of digital economy is significant for China's modern industry, market, and governance system. Technological innovation drives the high-quality development of the digital economy and provides a new engine for the digital economy to promote Chinese modernization. At present, China has entered a critical period of comprehensively promoting Chinese modernization. Theoretically clarifying the mechanism of promoting Chinese modernization through the digital economy based on technological innovation and measuring its impact in practice are theoretical and practical issues that need to be solved urgently. However, scholars are limited to the study of the pairwise relationship among the digital economy, technological innovation, and Chinese modernization and rarely incorporate the three into a unified framework for analysis; the five measurement dimensions of Chinese modernization have yet to be measured separately; moreover, there is a lack of quantitative analysis and nonlinear analysis of the mutual relationship.
Therefore, in accordance with the " Five-Sphere Integrated Plan" made in the 20th National Congress, this study analyzes Chinese modernization from the five dimensions of "economy, politics, culture, society, and ecological civilization modernization", and integrates digital economy, technological innovation, and Chinese modernization into the unified analysis framework to deeply analyze the impact mechanism of technological innovation-driven digital economy on Chinese modernization.Relevant data from 2015 to 2022 for the digital economy, technological innovation, and Chinese modernization in 30 provinces have been collected. Data sources include the Statistical Yearbook of China Culture and Related Industries (2016-2022) for cultural modernization, Baidu Index for democracy and rule of law construction, and the government information openness index and government online service index from the Guomai e-government network. Remaining data were obtained from the China Statistical Yearbook and provincial Statistical Yearbooks (2016-2023), with missing values supplemented by the interpolation method. The dynamic panel models and threshold models are constructed to measure the impact of the digital economy driven by technological innovation on Chinese modernization and its five dimensions (economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological modernization). The entropy method is employed to build the comprehensive evaluation index system of the Chinese modernization level, and Chinese modernization is further divided into "economic, political, cultural, social and ecological civilization modernization", while the comprehensive evaluation index system of the digital economy level (2 first-level indexes, 4 second-level indexes and 9 third-level indexes) is divided into industrial digitalization and digital industrialization to accurately measure the level of technological innovation, the level of digital economy and the level of Chinese modernization.
It is concluded that, first, the digital economy is significantly promoting Chinese modernization. Then, on the whole, the digital economy has a positive impact on Chinese modernization, initially growing and then subsequently diminishing in its impact. From the perspective of five dimensions of Chinese modernization, the impact of digital economy on economic, political, cultural, social and ecological civilization modernization is different in different stages: the effect of economic, political and cultural modernization increases first and then decreases positively, and the effect on social and ecological civilization modernization follows a U-shaped pattern. Third, technological innovation increases first and then decreases in the active adjustment of the digital economy, in the positive adjustment of the digital economy to promote Chinese modernization. After crossing a certain threshold, technological innovation positively moderates the impact of digital economy on economic, political, cultural, social and ecological modernization.
This paper presents some novelties in three aspects. Firstly, the analysis is carried out within the unified framework of digital economy, technological innovation, and Chinese modernization to study the mechanism of the digital economy driven by technological innovation on Chinese modernization (overall and five dimensions). Secondly, Chinese modernization is measured as a whole with the five dimensions investigated, respectively, and the influence effect among digital economy, technological innovation and Chinese modernization (the whole and the five dimensions) is explored. Thirdly, the threshold model is constructed to explore the nonlinear changes of Chinese modernization (overall and in five dimensions) when the digital economy and technological innovation are taken as threshold variables, respectively.