At the Fifth China Original Economics Forum and Economists & Entrepreneurs Summit held on September 6, senior media professional and researcher at Shandong University and City University of Macau, Zhang Zhi, stated that the current AI digital revolution constitutes a disruptive transformation of production factors. He argued it has restructured all traditional elements of production, including land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship, completely rewriting the economic development logic of the industrial era.

Zhang Zhi explained that industrial-age economic growth was heavily dependent on locational factors such as ports, shipping, and waterways. Coastal port cities rose rapidly thanks to their logistical advantages, while inland cities faced developmental constraints. However, the proliferation of AI and computing-power economies has shattered this pattern. Inland regions like Ulanqab and Alxa, which possess advantages in low temperatures, land availability, and electricity, have leveraged their computing center deployments to become new digital economic hubs. This has comprehensively redefined the value logic of traditional production factors such as land.

He pointed out that this disruptive change in production factors has rendered traditional economic theories inadequate. At the micro level, corporate business models, profit-generation logic, and competitive dynamics are all being rewritten. At the macro level, core economic indicators such as traditional unemployment rates are gradually losing their reference value. Looking ahead, as AI replaces labor at scale and distribution models centered on labor input evolve, unemployment rates will no longer serve as reliable economic barometers, necessitating an urgent reconstruction of traditional macroeconomic analytical frameworks. Concurrently, the digital economy is fostering entirely new virtual economic sectors, which are becoming the core space for future wealth growth and creating vast numbers of new employment and entrepreneurial opportunities.

Zhang Zhi emphasized that original economic research must move beyond piecemeal, incremental optimizations. Instead, it needs to anchor itself in the fundamental logic of digital factor restructuring and AI industrial transformation, building an entirely new economic theory framework suited to the intelligent era.