Currently, China’s digital economy has stepped into the leading rants of the world. Promoting its high-quality development is a strategic choice to seize opportunities from the new wave of technological revolution and industrial transformation, and a critical approach to securing future competitive advantages. Focusing on the strategic objectives of strengthening, optimizing, and expanding the digital economy, exploring the theoretical framework, strategic priorities, and implementation pathways for the development of the digital economy during the 15th Five-Year Plan period holds significant theoretical value and practical significance. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, China’s digital economy will exhibit characteristics such as revolutionary breakthroughs in digital technology, innovative allocation of data elements, digital and intelligent transformation of traditional industries, and accelerated advancement of digital-friendly reforms. Based on the phased characteristics of the development of China’s digital economy in the future, it is necessary to properly handle the relationships between government guidance and market dominance, between the development of the digital economy and the restructuring of traditional industries, between platform ecosystem innovation and scientific regulation, between digital dividends and the digital divide, between the development of eastern and western regions and large, medium, and small cities, and between domestic and international markets. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period, strategic priorities should include strengthening the foundation of digital infrastructure, improving the institutional mechanisms for the innovative development of the digital economy, creating a dual-driver system for the digital economy and data elements, promoting the deep integration of the real economy and the digital economy, enhancing the international competitiveness of the digital economy, and strengthening international cooperation in the digital economy. To achieve these strategic priorities, it is necessary to scientifically plan the implementation paths for the development of the digital economy during the 15th Five-Year Plan period: strengthening the innovative ecosystem of deep integration of industry, academia, research, and application to break through bottlenecks in key core technologies; deepening the digital transformation of enterprises across the entire value chain to unleash the synergistic potential of “AI+” and “data elements×”; stimulating the innovative vitality and ecological value of platform enterprises to strengthen scenario-driven collaborative empowerment; building world-class digital industrial clusters to solidify the core competitiveness of the data industry; and establishing a multi-tiered digital talent support system to achieve breakthroughs in both quantity and quality.