China Focus: East China city fuels innovation through focus on sci-tech

HEFEI, Oct. 18 (Xinhua) — Inside NIO’s second factory, located in an industrial park in Hefei, capital of east China’s Anhui Province, the automated production lines are efficiently assembling electric cars to meet robust market demand.
From January to September, the Chinese electric car startup delivered 149,281 vehicles, up 35.7 percent year on year. As of Oct. 1, its total deliveries amounted to over 590,000 units.
NIO’s growth has much to do with the city, which offered the automaker billions yuan of capital investment in 2020 to help it through the fundraising difficulties as the emerging industry’s outlook was clouded by uncertainty.
Then, with explosive growth of the new energy vehicle (NEV) market, Hefei quickly positioned itself as an NEV production hub in China, boasting plants of NIO, BYD, Volkswagen and others. From January to August, NEV output here surged 72 percent year on year to 783,000 units, ranking second among all cities nationwide.
Hefei is a place where enterprises are assured to grow in a stable, long-term way. This favorable innovation and business environment has provided fertile ground for the growth of NEV companies, said Jessie Wu, NIO’s vice president in charge of industrial planning.
The NEV industry reflects the booming growth of emerging industries in Hefei. A decade ago, this inland city had a lower profile, but due to its commitment to emerging and future industries, it has become a thriving center for innovation.
During the past decade, Hefei poured over 160 billion yuan (about 23 billion U.S. dollars) of state capital into strategic emerging industries, with earnings nearing 60 billion yuan, stimulating more than 620 billion yuan of total investment, according to local authorities.
Hefei is now a center for a wide range of high-tech industries, including integrated circuits, new displays, NEVs, artificial intelligence, low-altitude economy, aerospace information, quantum information and fusion energy.
In a list of global science and technology clusters published by the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2023, Hefei ranked 40th, up 15 places from the previous year.
The shift to high-tech industries has led to an economic miracle. During the past decade, Hefei’s economic output surged to over 1.2 trillion yuan from around 400 billion yuan, placing it among the fastest-growing cities in the country. Strategic emerging industries accounted for nearly 60 percent of its industrial output in 2023.
“The key to Hefei’s rapid development success lies in its long-term focus on developing new quality productive forces rather than sticking to traditional industries,” said Liu Zhiying, a professor at the School of Management of the University of Science and Technology of China.
Hefei has become a model of innovation by upgrading traditional industries and investing more in the research and development of strategic emerging industries, Liu said.
The city must also vigorously promote the industrialisation of cutting-edge scientific research results to cultivate future industries, Liu added.
Hefei is a science and technology research hub leading in fields such as quantum information and fusion energy, which could provide a steady source of momentum for the development of new quality productive forces.
The city has 13 large-scale scientific installations, including those under construction or in the preliminary research stage. Over the past two years, nearly a third of the country’s top 10 sci-tech breakthroughs came from Hefei, in fields like quantum technology, deep-space exploration and controlled nuclear fusion.
In the west of Hefei lies Science Island, home to the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, known as the “Chinese artificial sun.” Its ultimate goal is to create nuclear fusion like the sun, using substances abundant in the sea to provide a steady stream of clean energy.
Nuclear fusion, once commercially applied, is expected to solve mankind’s energy problems once and for all, according to experts from the Hefei Institute of Physical Science, the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In recent years, Hefei has adhered to sci-tech and industrial innovation, and the development of new quality productive forces is giving strong impetus to high-quality economic development, said Luo Yunfeng, mayor of Hefei. ■