A ship-building plant in Dalian city, Liaoning province. (PHOTO: VCG)

By CHEN Chunyou

Innovation remains at the heart of China's modernization drive. According to the report given to the 20th CPC National Congress, China will enhance basic scientific and technological capacity, and ensure better strategic input from the science and technology sector, so as to boost the overall efficiency of its innovation system.

In response, many regions have proposed their development strategies.

Optimize innovation ecosystem

Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region will move faster to establish an evaluation system for researchers that emphasizes innovation value, ability and contribution, and introduce additional inspiring measures to attract researchers from other provinces to come and work periodically in the region.

More efforts will be made to persuade high-level research institutes to set up innovation bases in Xinjiang, while establishing a number of clinical medical research centers and field scientific observation and research stations.

In addition, national agricultural science parks will be established in prefectures and cities, and technical task forces are encouraged to start businesses in rural areas, supporting industrial innovation and rural revitalization.

In order to unleash the vitality for innovation, major projects are expected to be carried out around advantageous industrial clusters in oil and gas production and processing, and cotton and textile production, to build a modern industrial system with Xinjiang characteristics, said Sun Yongjian, director-general at Science and Technology Department of Xinjiang.

Take advantage of regional potential

Yunnan is widely known as the kingdom of plants and animals in southwest China for its distinctive resources in these two fields.

Centering on ecological security, biodiversity protection and plateau lake protection and management, Yunnan will carry out forward-looking innovations to help resolve major national technological tasks.

Meanwhile, Yunnan will introduce measures to upgrade its opening up to Southeast Asian countries, such as holding international talent conferences, co-building laboratories and science parks, deepening cooperation in technology transfer and dispatching national technical task forces to carry out technological services.

To promote its high-quality development, industrial innovation in such advantageous fields as green energy, new materials, plateau modern agriculture, and biomedicine will be advanced. In particular, the open competition mechanism will be adopted to select the best candidates across society to address technical problems in these sectors.

Intensify strategic sci-tech strength

Liaoning province in northeast China will lay out major sci-tech infrastructure in marine engineering, computing power and high-performance materials, and reinforce its sci-tech strength in clean energy and high-end equipment manufacturing.

An internationally leading photonics science center is planned to be built in Dalian city, where overseas scientists are welcomed to conduct cooperative research with their Chinese counterparts.

At the same time, Dalian will introduce targeted policies for high-tech enterprises and support those mastering core technologies in building key laboratories and technological innovation centers, to make more pioneering breakthroughs.

The quality of provincial and municipal key laboratories will be improved by optimizing their layout and implementing a dynamic evaluation system.

In addition, leading tech enterprises are encouraged to undertake national research projects, and establish alliances with universities, institutes and related enterprises to produce practical results that cater to market demands.