Digitalization
Hangzhou, one of China’s most famous tourism destinations, has unveiled its ambitious plan to be the nation’s foremost city for the digital economy. “We plan to fulfill the mission through three major paths — industrialization of digital resources, digitalization of industries, urban digitalization — and their integration,” said Zhou Jiangyong, Party chief of Hangzhou.
In recent years, the capital of eastern Zhejiang province — home to Chinese IT mogul Jack Ma and his e-commerce empire Alibaba — has dramatically grown from a tourism-oriented city to an emerging city with strong digital economy.
In Hangzhou, more than 95 percent of the convenience stores, 98 percent of the taxis, all the buses and subways are supporting mobile payment.
“The industrialization of digital resources means they could be turned into a business with great opportunities, or the so-called Blue Ocean market,” Zhou said.
Currently, the city is leading in such cutting-edge sectors as e-commerce, cloud computing and big data, artificial intelligence and the internet of things — while it needs to make bigger progress in the integrated circuits, network communications, flexible electronics and data security industries, he noted.
More importantly, the city should accelerate its exploration of the fields of blockchain, quantum technology, virtual reality and satellite and commercial aerospace, which represent a development trend, he added.
While tapping the potential in digital resources, traditional industries in Hangzhou has increasingly turned digitalized to enhance their competitiveness at home and abroad.
In Bainiu, one of the city’s most poverty-stricken villages in Hangzhou’s Lin’an district, the locals started selling the area’s special pecan nuts online a couple of years ago. As a result, sales of the pecan nuts rose markedly from 1 million yuan ($145,315) in 2007 to 350 million yuan in 2017.
The per capita income of the villagers reached nearly 30,000 yuan last year, surpassing the average level of the residents in Lin’an, officials said.
According to Zhou, the digitalization of industries will focus on the development of robots, the renovation of the factories with IoT and the utilization of cloud technology.
The city will also accelerate the digitalized trade and cross-border e-commerce and extend the application of digital technologies and smart equipment to the agricultural industry, he noted.
The digitalization of urban management — what has been referred to as installing a brain for the city — is making Hangzhou smarter.
Currently, a subway system with a total length of 329 kilometers is under construction in the city, which led to a temporary shrinkage in aggregate road surface areas for vehicle transportation of nearly 20 percent.
But government statistics showed that transportation speeds on the roads improved by 15 percent in the first half of this year because of the operations of the “City Brain”.
Official figures also indicate that criminal cases in Hangzhou decreased by 8.9 percent year-on-year from January to August this year. Meanwhile, fire accidents plunged a whopping 42.6 percent from a year ago.
“This is making the city smarter and making people’s lives better,” Zhou said.
The operation of the “City Brain” will be extended from transportation management to urban management, housing, public security and market regulation in 2019 and further cover the Asian Games, tourism, environmental protection and fire prevention by 2022.
That’s according to the city’s action plan, released in October, which works as a guideline for the city from 2018 to 2022 to meet its ultimate goal of being the nation’s No 1 city for the digital economy.
According to the action plan, Hangzhou’s digital economy system will be fundamentally shaped by 2022, so that its digital economic output will hit more than 1.2 trillion yuan — a domestically leading level — of which the added value of the sector’s core industries will reach roughly 580 billion yuan, accounting for 58 percent of the province’s total.
The city also aims to build a couple of industrial clusters in the fields of e-commerce, cloud computing and big data, artificial intelligence, digital content and information security that are expected to have a global impact.