China’s northeast, known in the past for a big heavy industry sector, is often compared to the Ruhr region in Germany, as both have rich resources and both are looking hard for solutions to reinvigorate their old factories.
Jinzhou is one of the cities in this region. Its transformation offers much food for thought.
Going hi-tech
AI, 5G and industrial Internet. Jinzhou was quick to adopt the new-generation information technologies.
Digital transformation has given traditional manufacturing a “smart” new look. Jinheng, a large automotive safety company founded in Jinzhou in 1997, is a leading air bag and seat belt manufacturer. Today, its monitoring and data collection are fully digitalized throughout the R&D and production lifecycle, raising production efficiency by more than 30% and shortening the R&D cycle by 20%.
Hi-tech parks are mushrooming across the city. Tech giant Huawei runs a world-class cloud data center here with 15,000 servers, the first of its kind in northeast China.
Green is gold
Xiaoling River that runs through Jinzhou was once tainted by heavy industrial pollution, emitting strong odors in summer and releasing dust from its dried riverbed in winter.
To clean it up, petrochemical firms were made to upgrade their operational procedures and treat waste oil through recycling before discharge. It turns out the environmentally friendly techniques also made good business sense by significantly reducing disposal costs.
Meanwhile, R&D of green chemicals is in full swing. For example, the local government has been encouraging the production capacity of industrial grade isopropyl alcohol (IPA), a nontoxic and eco-friendly agent with wide industrial use. Today, Jinzhou’s productivity of G1 electronic grade IPA has reached 1,000 tonnes.
E-commerce and farm tourism
Beizhen, a township under Jinzhou, is known as the “hometown of grapes.” It has the country’s largest fresh grape storage capacity. Riding on China’s e-commerce boom, grape growers are selling products in online stores and via livestreaming channels. Orders can reach 500 boxes a day.
Grape farms are also serving sightseeing purposes. City-dwellers can come here to try their hand at farming, have a taste of freshly picked grapes and enjoy a break from the hustle and bustle of city life. The grape-related industry in Beizhen now boasts an annual output of over two billion yuan. Local farmers are making more money and villages are seeing real development.
New quality productive forces (NQPF), the new buzzword in China, is capturing the imagination of many China watchers. It is as much about the cutting-edge technologies as it is about overhauling the traditional industries. As Jinzhou shows, the way to develop NQPF can be varied and the determining factor is how to leverage the local conditions.