Songjiang vows to boost global cooperation on sci-tech innovation

With high-quality development in mind, Songjiang will enhance international cooperation in science and technology innovation, according to Cheng Xiangmin, Party secretary of the suburban Shanghai district.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, Cheng said that innovation should be a mutual benefit to the export and import of high-quality technology and the district aims to create a complete industry chain to hedge against the uncertain global industrial situation.

Relying on the Songjiang hub and China-Europe freight train service, the G60 Science and Technology Innovation Corridor of the Yangtze River Delta region in the district will continue to serve the Belt and Road countries, he promised.

The seven-year-old G60 Corridor connects nine cities – Shanghai; Jiaxing, Hangzhou, Jinhua and Huzhou in Zhejiang Province; Suzhou in Jiangsu Province; and Anhui Province's Xuancheng, Wuhu and Hefei. It has been incorporated in the nation's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) for allocating global resources and driving national development.

Thanks to the G60, the suburban district's fiscal revenue saw an average annual growth of 12.4 percent between 2016 and 2020.

Songjiang boasts more than 1,600 industrial companies with annual business revenue of at least 20 million yuan (US$2.8 million), topping the other districts in the city during the past two years.

To better serve these firms and encourage innovation, the district has taken many measures.

Nearly 90 service windows for the area have inter-provincial government services in the nine cities, which means applicants for 178 services like business licenses can have the errands done in any city among the nine. The system has served the companies over one million times, Cheng observed.

Chu Zhaobao, general manager of Shanghai Haier Laundry Electric Appliance, gave an example.

"Under the support of the district government and the system, the construction of our factory in Songjiang, with a 120,000-square-meter floor area, began in 2021 and it went into service this year. The period has been reduced by half a year approximately and it is the fastest in the nearly 40-year history of Haier," Chu pointed out.

The factory is for Haier's high-end brand Casarte. The group chose Shanghai as the location of the factory because of the good government service and its customer base, although the cost of setting up a factory in Shanghai is higher than that in other places, he said.

The district is also concerned about talent. To lure more talents to join companies in the district, Songjiang promotes cooperation between universities and enterprises.

"Many of our employees graduated from Songjiang University Town and many out-of-town people are willing to work for our company because of high-quality and low-rent housing," Wu Jianying, president of Haohai Biological Technology, stated.

The Songjiang-based company is a leading firm focusing on the research and development, manufacturing and sales of biomedical materials.

Liu Fusheng, deputy head of the district, said that about 17,000 fully-furnished apartments have been provided for talents in Songjiang. It also offers talents subsidies ranging from around 670 yuan to 4,500 yuan per month to ensure that the rental expense is around 10 percent of their salary.

Talents in Songjiang can also have other subsidies and rewards for internship, employment, training and so on. The policy has benefited more than 25,000 people, Liu added.

"Because of the government's effort, companies can innovate with one heart and one mind without any worries," Wu noted.

Many innovative achievements have been made in Songjiang recently, such as the cloning of gene-edited monkeys by somatic cell nuclear transfer. Last week, the G60 Brain Intelligence Sci-Tech Innovation Base released the world's first set of spatial distribution maps of monoplast in the cerebral cortex of macaques.