"The Chinese economy is facing challenges as it nears the end of its "demographic dividend" fueled by an oversupply of low-technology markets, said Matthew Cheung, research director at Gartner. "For Chinese enterprises, the adoption of bimodal IT, Internet of Things technologies and digital business will be critical to business transformation during China's economic transformation period."

The Chinese government is attempting to accelerate the country's economic transformation by supporting investment in high-technology industries and encouraging more innovation. Its "Internet plus," "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" and "made in China 2025" strategies have become key phrases for the areas that receive more attention and investment from the government and private sectors. ICT will assume an important role to support this transformation.

Gartner's 2016 Hype Cycle for ICT in China report maps 23 hyped technologies throughout the life cycle stages of on the rise, at the peak and sliding into the trough (see Figure 1). Compared with mature markets, some technologies (such as cloud and digital commerce platform) are being adopted faster in China, but some are slower (such as autonomous vehicles).