Tianjin puts priority on innovation

The coastal city of Tianjin, with its hundred-year history of industrial development, is now looking to transform its development structure - from energy- and resource-intensive to sustainable, high-tech and innovative.

Zhang Gaoli, Tianjin's Party chief, has emphasized that "increasing our innovative skills and building an innovative city are critical in our economic development as is changing our industrial structure".

In October 2009, the National Defense Technology University, cooperating with Tianjin's Binhai New Area, developed the "Tianhe-I" - a supercomputer that can perform at least 1 quadrillion calculations per second. China's supercomputer TOP 100 list ranked the "Tianhe-I" in first place in 2009. This is a major innovation in China's strategic technology and equipment sector, and puts China second in the world, after the United States, in the development of petaflop-level supercomputers.