Food delivery driver’s Zhangjiang insight
FOOD delivery driver Zhu Yanjun knows how to recognize who are programmers and engineers, after working for four years in Zhangjiang of the Pudong New Area.
“They are wearing casual clothes, working badges, and often glasses, sometimes working late,” said Zhu, who delivers food for Meituan.
His clients are employees from top firms Alibaba, Baidu ByteDance, Honeywell, Lenovo, Microsoft, SAP and many startups in Zhangjiang, covering businesses from chip design and manufacture to artificial intelligence and biomedicine.
“Driverless cars and robots are not strange to me. I have seen them many times (in Zhangjiang),” said Zhu.
Zhu’s peak times are from 5-8pm for dinner and then 10pm to midnight for those on working overtime for the chips, applications, drugs and electric cars used by millions of people.
It’s totally different from his “idle state” when Zhu first came to Zhangjiang from his hometown in central China’s Henan Province.
Zhangjiang has become “a forefront of innovation capabilities of Shanghai” and even China, for high-quality economy development and digital transformation.
It’s home to 100,000 tech firms, including 9,000 national level high-tech firms, said Wu Qing, Shanghai’s vice mayor.
“Zhangjiang is a Shanghai calling card as an innovation ecosystem,” Wu said.
By the end of 2020, Zhangjiang was home to 330 national research centers set up by scientists such as Tsung-Dao Lee and Zhu Guangya and universities including Fudan, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Tsinghua and Zhejiang.
They cover latest tech and innovations on brain science, quantum research and synchrotron radiation.
The Mozi Satellite, the C919 domestically developed large passenger plane and historic photos of Black Hole are the results.
Some of Zhu’s clients include world-leading scientists.
So far, there are 2.38 million people working in Zhangjiang — 3.2 percent are foreign experts or people who have studied overseas.
It has made Shanghai the first choice for world scientists to work in China for eight consecutive years, Wu said.
In the 14th Five-Year Plan to 2025, Shanghai will encourage more international cooperation covering public health care and carbon neutrality.
Zhangjiang is a key platform for the city for international science cooperation and integrated innovation in the Yangtze River Delta, according to the Shanghai Science and Technology Commission.
Shanghai is also mulling an international talent zone in Zhangjiang.
The city offers tax subsidies worth about 30 billion yuan (US$4.6 billion) in Zhangjiang to boost innovation, attract highend talent and support small and medium-sized firms.
Firms in Zhangjiang are also supported with policies and an incubation system of 820 innovation service organizations with incubation bases and public service platforms.
By the end of 2020, totally 32 firms had listed in the Shanghai STAR Market, accounting oneseventh of total companies on the Nasdaq-like board.
In 2020, firms invested about 200 billion yuan in 600 projects in Shanghai’s science parks.
The top projects include Unisoc for chip design, Shanghai Pharmaceuticals’ biopharmaceutical facility and Galaxycore’s investment of US$2.2 billion in semiconductor manufacturing.
The core development trends in Zhangjiang are integrated circuits or chips, biomedicine and artificial intelligence.
Zhangjiang now has China’s most complete chip industry chain.
It is the headquarters of SMIC — the Semiconductor Manufacture International Corp — the biggest chipmaker on the Chinese mainland.
It has listed on the STAR Market and is the top firm on the board by value.
Fueled by the industry development in Zhangjiang, Shanghai’s semiconductor industry revenue hit 180 billion yuan in 2020 — one-fifth of the national total.
In biomedicine, Zhangjiang contributed 18 innovative medical devices since 2014, compared with total 99 in China.
In 2019, one-third of class-one new drugs in China came from Zhangjiang.
The city is mulling policies to simplify and speed up new drug approval processes for firms in Zhangjiang, local officials said on Tuesday.
More than 2,400 AI firms, including Microsoft’s AI center, are operating in Zhangjiang, accounting for 70 percent of the city’s total business.
They also include startups such as TMiRob, which has been developing disinfection robots during the coronavirus pandemic.