Workers check equipment at a photovoltaic (PV) power station, which combines fish farming and solar power generation, in Zhenwu Town of Yangzhou in east China’s Jiangsu Province, May 25, 2022.

NANJING, Broadcasting News Corporation : Driverless vehicles zoom on specially renovated smart roads one after another, transporting goods and people. This scene is not from a sci-fi movie but a daily occurrence in an area of east China’s Jiangsu Province. Just a 23-minute train ride from Shanghai, the Suzhou High-Speed Rail New Town has gathered more than 100 enterprises in the autonomous driving industry over the past 10 years, covering software algorithms, environment sensing, communications networks and other fields. The development of the New Town area demonstrates Jiangsu’s efforts in building itself into a hub of advanced manufacturing.
In the past 10 years, Jiangsu has played to its strengths in the real economy, and worked hard to consolidate the foundation of manufacturing and develop advanced manufacturing clusters, said Wu Zhenglong, secretary of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China.
MANUFACTURING STRONGHOLD
In 2021, the value-added output of Jiangsu’s manufacturing industry exceeded 4 trillion yuan (579 billion U.S. dollars), making up 35.8 percent of its GDP, the highest ratio compared with other provincial-level regions in China, according to the provincial department of industry and information technology. The province has fostered 16 advanced manufacturing clusters and 50 key industrial chains in various sectors such as the Internet of Things (IoT), engineering machinery, and wind power equipment. A traditional commercial city, Wuxi, in south Jiangsu, has evolved into a highland of the IoT industry in China with more than 3,000 related companies, leading the formulation of over half of the IoT international standards. In the past decade, the revenue of the IoT industry in Wuxi saw an average yearly growth of over 27 percent. In Rudong County, which boasts Asia’s largest offshore wind farm, a whole industrial chain containing the manufacturing of wind turbines and supporting equipment has formed. It is also home to China’s first offshore wind power port, which can provide whole-process services to the industry, such as storage, transportation and maintenance. With a surge in new energy vehicle output this year, Jiangsu leads the country in the total output, sales volume and installed capacity of power batteries. The province’s 163 key enterprises in the power and energy-storage battery industries reported a total output value of 120 billion yuan in the first half of 2022, a year-on-year surge of 84.6 percent.
SMART TRANSFORMATION
Over the past decade, Jiangsu has accelerated intelligent industrial transformation. By the end of July, some 166,000 5G base stations had been built across Jiangsu, realizing full 5G coverage of all urban areas and providing a solid infrastructure for smart manufacturing. At the intelligent workshop of Wuxi Putian Iron Core Co., Ltd., pieces of silicon steel will soon turn into finished products of transformer cores with just some clicks by operators. “Embracing smart technology is the key to our success,” said Liang Linqiu, vice chairman of the company, noting that they have spent about 300 million yuan in transforming production lines since 2015.
The quality of the company’s products has significantly improved, and the per capita output value is 10 times higher than before, Liang added. Xu Kunlin, governor of Jiangsu, said that the digital economy is a massive boost to the province’s transformation and development, with its scale exceeding 5 trillion yuan in 2021, accounting for 11.8 percent of the country’s total. As of 2021, Jiangsu had gathered 52 smart manufacturing demonstration factories and 1,639 intelligent workshops. In late 2021, the province initiated a three-year plan to accomplish the intelligent transformation and digitization of some 50,000 major industrial companies. About 22,000 enterprises took action in the first half of this year. Meanwhile, green development has become a new mark of manufacturing in Jiangsu. Over the past decade, the province’s energy consumption per unit of GDP has decreased by 38 percent, and 199 national-level green factories have been established. “Jiangsu will further upgrade its industrial basis and promote the modernization of industrial chains, aiming to become an advanced manufacturing base with international competitiveness and influence,” said Wu. NEWS COLLECTED FROM XINHUA NEWS.