5 cities playing bigger digital role

Five second-tier cities - Chengdu, Suzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan and Xi'an - are representative on the Chinese mainland in terms of their rapidly growing skills base in the digital economy, according to a report released on Wednesday.

These cities displayed an obvious advantage in their digital talent pools over others in the past three years, although Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou, which is the base of e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, remain the five leading cities in this area, according to the report based on user data by LinkedIn, a US-based networking website.

The number of such talent in Chengdu, for example, which took the sixth place in the rankings of the cities, was nearly 18,500. It compared to 10,000 and 8,200 - the number of such talents in Dalian and Tianjin, which followed the top 10 cities.