Tianjin's watchwords: quality and sustainability

It's full steam ahead as city drives economy and industry into the future

Tianjin is seeking sustainable growth as it switches its economic and industrial focus from pursuing quantity to pursuing quality and efficiency, local officials say.

The city's GDP grew an average of 8.9 percent over the past five years, official figures show.

The municipality, 115 kilometers southeast of Beijing, is accelerating the transformation of its development pattern and optimizing its economic structure to secure higher-quality growth, the officials said.

"We're abandoning out-of-date factories, closing polluting businesses and developing advanced, high-tech and highly efficient industries that ... will help improve the environment," Tianjin Daily quoted Yin Jihui, director of the Tianjin Commission of Industry and Information Technology, as saying.

Major industries in the city, including new-generation information technology, advanced machinery manufacturing and new materials, continued to grow last year.

Local authorities are gearing up to create an advanced manufacturing industry system, and the city's total industrial output value is forecast to surpass 4 trillion yuan ($582 billion) in 2020.

The advanced manufacturing industry is then forecast to account for 70 percent of the city's total industrial output, the city government said.

The high-tech sector is another major force behind the city's efforts in pursuit of high-quality growth.

Tianjin is speeding up construction of a national innovation demonstration area and has attracted 88 high-level research institutes, including Tianjin Research Institute for Advanced Equipment at Tsinghua University.

About 97,000 technology businesses are located in the city. Of them, 4,200 can each generate revenue of 100 million yuan a year, and more than 4,000 have been granted the status of national high-tech businesses, the industry and information technology commission said.

There were 56 national technological centers in local companies last year, compared with 22 in 2012, Yin said.

At Tianjin International Joint Academy of Biomedicine, nearly 240 high-tech startups have been supported, involving a total of 3.2 billion yuan in registered capital.

"Backed by the comprehensive platform of the academy and the city's favorable industrial policies, we have attracted a growing number of high-level professionals to Tianjin to start up their businesses or conduct innovation," said Huang Yalou, the academy's Party chief.

The academy has brought in more than 60 top experts listed on national and city-level talent recruitment initiatives, enabling it to become an important biopharmaceuticals innovation center in the city.

Promoting innovative technologies, new business modes and emerging industries helps to locate new economic growth spots, local experts said.

In Tianjin, modern service sectors including finance, technology services, e-commerce, tourism, conferences and exhibitions and information services are on the fast track.

More than 3 million Tianjin residents now have access to optical fiber services, accounting for more than 94 percent of broadband internet users in the city and ranking top of the country.

Construction of a Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei comprehensive experimental zone specializing in big data technology has begun in Tianjin. Four major big data centers funded by the high-tech companies Tencent, Huawei, Telstra PBS and China Hualu Group have also set up operations in the city.

With the internet, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence technologies increasingly integrated with the real economy, the city government has set a goal of helping more than 6,000 companies to realize transformation.

(China Daily 09/19/2018 page15)