Xu Qiang, President of SIC attended and addressed the 2023 Conference for the Cultivation and Development of Emerging Strategic Industries during the 25th China Hi-Tech Fair in Shenzhen on November 17th, 2023.

Xu Qiang said that to speed up boosting emerging strategic industries and creating new momentum for future industries will still be a major task for economic development at the current stage. Xu shared three points of view on accelerating the cultivation and development of emerging strategic industries and future industries, in a bid to promote the formation of new productivity.

The first point is that we should accelerate the integration of “four chains” to build an independent and self-led industrial innovation system. As President Xi Jinping mentioned in the report of the 20th CPC National Congress, we should promote deeper integration of the innovation, industrial, capital and talent chains. “The integration of four chains” is an important theoretical innovation in the progress of further implementing the innovation-driven development strategy for meeting new challenges under a new situation. It provides new ideas and new path for opening up new areas and new arenas in development, and for steadily fostering new growth impetus. Since the beginning of the 14th Five-Year Plan period, “the integration of four chains” becomes the main engine for high-quality development of strategic emerging industries. Despite the outstanding development achievements made by “the integration of four chains”, shortcomings within some core links are still prominent. More efforts should be made to give full play of the potential of various innovation entities, thus further enhancing the independent capacity of industrial chain and innovation chain.

First, we should establish and improve our technological innovation with government guidance, enterprise-led innovation, talents, research institute and financial support, and strengthen our basic research capacity. We will take the initiative to adapt to the integrated and development trend of “the four chains” in organizing the implementation of basic research programs, encouraging and guiding universities to optimize their disciplines and majors, and exploring a new model for basic research with long-term cooperation among the government, universities and enterprises. We will promote the collaborative research and development in areas of key materials, processes and components, and to explore new models with coordination between science, technology and industry, and interaction between scientific research achievements and applications, in order to improve innovation capacity in key links and key areas. We will strengthen the interconnections among industrial, educational and financial areas, increasing diversified financial support, and attracting more private capital to invest in basic innovation for emerging strategic industries.

Second, we should make full use of the potential of leading innovative enterprises, and to promote the industrial application of innovative achievements. We should increase our support and guidance for innovative and leading enterprises in emerging industries, encouraging enterprises working together with all kinds of innovation entities to expand their investment in research and development, thus to create forward-looking application scenarios, and accelerate industrial application of research achievements.

Third, we should make steady efforts to improve our talent management system, so as to give full play to the fundamental role of talents in industrial innovation. We must increase our investment in training urgently needed and specialized talents to support the industrial chain and innovation chain in key areas, introducing and cultivating leading sci-tech talents, basic research talents and high-level innovation teams in key industries, major projects and key disciplines. Efforts should be made to guide and motivate talents to make innovative contributions to the development of emerging strategic industries.

The second point is that we should promote the development of integrated strategic emerging industrial clusters, so as to cultivate new growth engines. In recent years, sound achievements have been made while China has fully implemented its development project of national strategic emerging industrial clusters, forming an amount of industrial highlands with competitive advantages across the country. In the following steps we will double our efforts on our works, taking the development of strategic emerging industrial clusters as a leverage to promote the emergence of new growth impetus.

First, we will promote the integration within strategic emerging industrial clusters. We should give full play to the attributes of extensively integration and penetration of cutting-edge technologies such as digital technologies, accelerating integration in emerging areas to promote the emergence of new innovation ideas in cross-cutting areas and to facilitate new growth impetus with the leading capacity of advanced technologies.

Second, we will promote the integration among strategic emerging industrial clusters. We will actively promote the mutual opening and free flow of innovative resource elements among regions to improve the ability of optimizing regional resource allocation, thus to build a number of strategic emerging industrial clusters which are more efficient and competitive.

Third, we will strengthen the coordinated development of industries among regions. We will promote staggered development of strategic emerging industrial clusters from different regions in an orderly manner, and accelerate the formation of staggered competition in industries and integrated development of industrial chain, supply chain and innovation chain.

The third point is that we should expedite our efforts to build promotion system for future industries, taking the initiative of the development of future industries. At present, major countries are actively laying out the development of future industries, and striving to occupy new arenas in future development. The future industry also becomes a major innovation opportunity for China. Given that our country has attached great importance to the development of the future industry, relative tasks is carrying out in an intensive way. We can start from three aspects considering the perspective of further improving the policy system in the future.

The first aspect is to accelerate the industrialization of future technologies. We should increase our supply to make innovation breakthrough, transform research achievements and accelerate industrial development, in order to encourage the acceleration of future industrial layout, and to promote the implementation of a number of major future industrial projects.

The second aspect is to promote the application of future scenarios so as to guide the rolling out of industries. We will create application scenarios for future technology, and implement model projects for cross-border integrated industries, thus accelerating industrial application.

The third aspect is to accelerate the transformation of key industries to be more future-oriented. Given the development requirements and technical challenges in the future, we will promote industrial transformation in key areas such as transportation, urban construction and tourism in order to create industrial forms that better adapt to the future changes.