New Technologies Foster Strong Economy
Beijing’s Zhongguancun Science Park owns 86 international standards led or participated in by science and technology enterprises such as Lenovo and Sinovac. High-tech zones in other areas of China also possess a number of international standards, such as TD-SCDMA, optical communication techniques, industrial control technology, laser gas analytical instruments, OLED display techniques, and radio frequency coaxial connectors. These international standards guide industrial development and enhance the speaking rights of Chinese enterprises within international competition.
The two Chinese-made automobile production lines in Detroit, the Motor City, are now manufacturing the best-selling Ford Motor models. But little more than 10 years ago, China’s main automotive production equipment depended largely on imports.
In the past decade, China’s equipment manufacturing industry has maintained annual growth of 25 percent. It has also made various technical breakthroughs. They include the “Tianhe-1” one of the world’s few Petascale supercomputers, a train capable of travelling at 486.1 km per hour, the world’s first high-performance DC inverter centrifugal, a 5MW permanent magnetic direct drive offshore wind turbine generator system, an all-steel radial tire one-step molding machine, a 7,500-ton full-circle slewing floating crane, a large-scale tunnel boring machine, and IC manufacturing equipment, to name but a few.
Since 2009, China’s gross output of equipment manufacturing has surpassed that of the U.S. China is now the world’s first manufacturing power. This, however, is only part of the story. “At present, China’s equipment manufacturing industry’s dependence on foreign technologies is more than 50 percent. It is even higher in some sectors – 80 percent in high-end chip, 80 percent in high-quality heavy casting and forging of power generation assembly, 90 percent in top-grade numerically-controlled machine tools and robots, and almost 100 percent in high-speed rail bearings,” vice president of China Academy of Machinery Science & Technology Qu Xianming said. China, as an equipment manufacturing power, has extensive development space in enterprise and international cooperation.
As China pays equal attention to ecological health as it does to economic development, the energy conservation and environmental protection industry is proliferating. China’s environmental protection industry comprises around 24,000 organizations, 400 of them listed companies, according to a joint survey by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Bureau of Statistics. Their combined annual revenue is around RMB three trillion.
Developing new energy vehicles is part of the national plan to control air pollution. China hence looks to become the most important and competitive electric vehicle market. China will maintain its fiscal subsidies to support new energy vehicles. It will also enlarge the scope of cities and vehicle models receiving the subsidy, according to a development plan released in September 2013. From 2013 to 2015, China will popularize at least 10,000 green cars in megalopolises and key areas, and 5,000 cars in other cities and regions. China’s research and development of new energy automobiles has reached an internationally advanced level. The country has also established perfect technical standards and detection systems, with a commercial demonstration scale that leads the world. China ranked a global third from 2005 to 2012 in its patent applications for clean energy vehicles. This was a level equal to that of Germany and South Korea, and accounted for eight percent of patent applications throughout the world.
In preparation for an era that is becoming increasingly digitalized, intelligent and personalized, a cloud computing base has been built in Gui’an New District of Guizhou Province. It is expected to advance construction of a cloud computing and big data service platform oriented towards the government, the public and companies. Big data has become an emerging strategic technology in China, according to Minister of Industry and Information Technology Miao Wei. “It is a new trend since the application of Internet, cloud computing and mobile Internet. China is now ready to facilitate development of the big data industry,” Miao said.
At the Big Data Day forum last December in Zhongguancun, China’s innovation hub, Skycloud CEO Lei Tao commented that big data has become a part of infrastructure. It is now fundamental practice for companies to complete a full IT application, explore the value of business data and foster competitive innovations. Meanwhile, big data influences every aspect of the life and work of the common people.
