China's digital economy registered 35.8 trillion yuan (about 5.07 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2019, accounting for 36.2 percent of the country's GDP, up by 1.4 percentage points compared with the previous year, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).

The CAICT, a government think tank, revealed the figure in a white paper released on Thursday night, saying that China's digital economy grew by 15.6 percent last year.

The white paper said that the added value of the digital industry totaled 7.1 trillion yuan in 2019, increasing 11.1 percent from 2018, while a total of 28.8 trillion yuan of added value was generated by other industries through applying digital technologies, including agriculture, manufacture and services sectors.

At the provincial level, the added value of the digital economy of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Hubei, Sichuan, Henan, Hebei, Anhui, and Hunan surpassed one trillion yuan last year. Meanwhile, the digital economy of Beijing and Shanghai accounted for over 50 percent of their cities' GDP respectively.