On May 24, the Chongqing delegation to the National People's Congress (NPC) held an online press conference on the City of Intelligent Manufacturing and Smart City. There were four NPC deputies who participated in the cloud press conference and shared their opinions and views about what measures Chongqing will take to promote Intelligent Manufacturing vigorously.

Chen Jinshan, Director of Chongqing Economy and Information Technology Committee, Yang Fan, Deputy Director-General of Chongqing Big Data Administration, Zhu Huarong, General Manager of Chongqing Chang'an Automobile Co., Ltd., and Zhu Mingyue, Chairman of Chongqing Zhubajie Network Co., Ltd (ZBJ.com).

Fostering deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy

"Chongqing will build more than 30,000 5G base stations and accelerate to give play to the demonstration role of '5G + Intelligent Manufacturing'," said Chen Jinshan. Chongqing will continue to promote innovation in big data intelligence, accelerate digital industrialization and industrial digitalization, and boost the coordinated development of intelligent industry, intelligent manufacturing, and smart city.

In 2019, the added value of Chongqing's high-tech manufacturing industry and strategic emerging industries increased by 12.6% and 11.6%, respectively. The approval to build a national pilot zone for innovative development of the digital economy facilitated an increase of 15% in the added value of the digital economy in Chongqing. In addition, Chongqing registered 890 new digital production lines. More high-end research institutions, such as Intel FPGA, have chosen to settle down in Chongqing.

In the next step, by centering on expanding digital industrialization, Chongqing will focus on the development of integrated circuits, new displays, intelligent terminals, IoT, network communications and network security products, software information services, and other industries.

At the same time, Chongqing will encourage small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to make full use of the open industrial cloud platform to move equipment, production lines, orders, and other systems to the cloud. Throughout the year, it will promote 3,000 SMEs to migrate their services to the cloud.

It will continue to promote innovation in technological research and development and highlight the application of emerging technologies such as big data, AI, virtual reality, digital twinning, and 5G. It will make more considerable efforts to launch 1,250 intelligent transformation projects and build 110 digital workshops and intelligent factories.

The city will also continue to cultivate new research and development institutions and promote industrial big data innovation centers to enhance services. 

To promote innovation, opening-up, and cooperation to a higher level, Chongqing will well organize every session of Smart China Expo, and gather technology, capital, talents, and material through strong informatization capability.

Chongqing to Complete the China-Singapore International Supercomputing Center

In August 2019, Chongqing proposed to concentrate on the construction of a "smart city" and focus on the five key elements, including five elements of cloud, IoT, big data, computing, and application, with preliminary results yielded. It has completed and opened the first point-to-point purely China-Singapore International Data Channel in China, with a bandwidth of 260Gbps and a time delay of about 70-80 milliseconds. Chongqing has built 10,000 5G base stations and "high speed", "large bandwidth", "low latency", and "high reliability" signify significantly improved cross-border communication capabilities.  Besides, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Inspur, Huawei, and other industry giants have made strategic investments in Chongqing.

According to Yang Fan, by 2022, Chongqing will strive to become a demonstration city for the application of big data intelligence and be listed among the first queue of new smart city construction in the country.

It will complete the construction of the Chongqing digital cloud platform. It will basically complete the migration of government information systems to the cloud, with the integration rates of municipal and district- and county-level information systems reaching 75% and 50% respectively.

The city will build the China-Singapore International Supercomputing Center that can realize a floating-point operations performance of 30 quadrillion times per second. Additionally, the China-Singapore International Data Channel will open up 1000Mbps bandwidth and will cultivate 50 new channel users.

It will further push forward the sharing and interconnection of government data in Chengdu and Chongqing.

Software-defined vehicles will represent a new trend

"In the future, vehicles will change the world and our lives with the huge industry driving force of dozens or even hundreds of times that of smartphones," Zhu Huarong said, the rapid breakthroughs in the chip, 5G, Internet, and AI technologies will bring new vitality to the auto industry.

As a typical representative enterprise of Chinese auto brands, Chang'an Automobile will grasp the opportunity of intelligent development of the auto industry, in a bid to accelerate its transformation to a smart travel technology company.

Vehicles will serve as a multi-functional mobile space, large, intelligent mobile terminal, data collection carrier, and energy storage unit. Software-defined vehicles will represent a new trend, and this is also the optimal time for Chinese auto brands to develop the auto industry rapidly.

So far, Chang'an Automobile has launched nearly 600,000 intelligent connected vehicles to the market. It has cooperated with partners, including Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, Bosch, and iFLYTEK, to build a world-class social network in the intelligent field. Chang'an Automobile has mastered more than 200 intelligent core technologies and is the first in China to have achieved the mass production of 21 industry-leading technologies, such as IACC and APA5.0. More than 100 varieties of smart products and services are used by Chinese auto users.

Moreover, it has led the development in the autonomous driving field. Chang'an Automobile set a Guinness World Record for the largest parade of L3 autonomous vehicles in 2018 and has achieved the mass production of such vehicles in 2020. In addition, it is the first in China to have realized the pilot operation of L4 autonomous vehicles, marking its leading position in the industry.

Talent is crucial to promote the development of the digital economy

The Fourth Industrial Revolution was driven by new technologies represented by  AI, big data, and robots are further advancing. "The key to build a City of Intelligent Manufacturing and Smart City is to develop the digital economy and attracting talent," indicated Zhu Mingyue.

In the process of digital transformation, enterprises need to experience three stages: informatization, digitization, and intelligentization.

The development of the digital economy must be strongly backed by digital talent. However, digital talent will be in great shortage for a long time to come. According to the recruitment websites, the demand for AI and big data talent increased 11 times between 2015 and 2019. Specifically, the total jobs in the digital economy field reached 191 million in 2018. The AI field alone requires over five million talent to fill in the gap.

Amid the COVID-19 outbreak, plenty of digital economy-related businesses came into being, which creates new jobs and further leads to the shortage of digital talent.

Zhu Mingyue suggests exploring the integrated development model of the digital industry and deepening international cooperation in the digital economy. He proposes multiple parties work to co-build shared digital economy infrastructure that is government-guided and market-oriented, jointly creating featured competitive industry clusters and undertake the industries transferred from eastern China.

In addition, he also suggests building a science and technology innovation center in western China, a high-end comprehensive technological service platform, and a public digital talent training service platform. He proposes to build Chongqing into a distributing center for international and domestic innovation elements and a junction of giving full play to its geographical advantages and promoting the replacement of old growth drivers by new ones. At the same time, it is an opportunity for Chongqing to become an experimental plot featuring a new technology service mechanism and model and a reservoir of talents pushing forward the high-quality development of the city.