Dalian aims to become tech leader

The coastal city Dalian, Liaoning province, is accelerating its digital sector development, aiming to rank first among cities in Northeast China for 5G investment and base station construction in 2020.

This year is a crucial year for 5G construction in Dalian, Zhao Yongbo, director of the city's development and reform commission, said at a conference on Monday about the city's build-out of its digital sector and 5G development.

"We will accelerate the construction of 'Digital Dalian', improve the government's governance capacity through digitalization, realize economic transformation and upgrading through digital industrialization and industrial digitalization and provide high-quality social services through comprehensive data platforms," Zhao said.

The list of priorities for Digital Dalian showed 39 main tasks in four aspects — construction of new digital infrastructure, improvement of innovation and application capacity in the digital sector, promotion of digital upgrading and the promotion of digital governance for the region.

In 2019 Dalian established the first digital economy statistics system in Northeast China, with seven industrial categories included those in core industries of the digital economy. The added value of core industries in the digital economy in Dalian reached 71.26 billion yuan ($10.1 billion) in 2019, up 21.9 percent year-on-year, which is 10.2 percent of the city's GDP.

Under Dalian's action plan for promoting the development of the digital economy, the city will become a major data hub in China, a nationally renowned digital technology innovation center, a national first-class digital industry development zone and a national leading digital economy integration application zone.