Abstract:

This paper examines, by using the historical materialism perspective, the internal mechanisms that new-quality productive forces use to drive the transformation of digital government. The interactions between productive forces and national governance during the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Information Revolution can be distlieed to reveal the political attributes of productive forces and their significant impact on national governance. This paper identifies three dimensions through which new-quality productive forces drive the transformation of digital government. (1) Institutional Foundation: Data is a key factor that reconfigures the relations of production, compelling the transformation of government functions and institutional innovation, optimizing the business environment, and strengthening institutional supply. (2) Social Conditions: The deepening of social stratification and the increasing complexity of interest patterns give rise to a new governance model of multi-party cooperation that facilitates the reshaping of government-society relations. (3) Ideological Leadership: New development concepts such as innovation-driven, human-centered orientation, and systems thinking lead to the reconstruction of governance paradigms that promote the renewal of governance concepts. Further analysis shows that there exists a dialectical interaction between new-quality productive forces and the transformation of digital government. Digital government is a concentrated embodiment of new-quality productive forces in national governance. Institutional innovation provides a safeguard for the development of new-quality productive forces. The paper also distills four major laws governing the role of the new-quality productive forces that drive national governance transformation: embeddedness, adaptability, enabling-constraint nature, and dialectical evolution. As this study's results indicate, the construction of digital government is an inevitable requirement for the development of new-quality productive forces. It is also a crucial lever for modernizing the national governance system and its capabilities, playing a significant role in guiding the development of digital civilization.

Key words: new-quality productive forces, digital government, national governance, historical materialism