On the afternoon of July 22, 2020, Wang Qingxian, member of the Standing Committee of the Shandong Provincial Party Committee and Secretary of the Qingdao Municipal Party Committee, talked to the reporter for a full hour and a half, and detailed his thoughts and explorations on reform paths since taking office as the Secretary of Qingdao Municipal Party Committee in the conference room of the Qingdao Organization Conference Center.
General Secretary’s Instructions and Requirements for Qingdao Are The Strategic Goals of Qingdao’s Development.
General Secretary Xi Jinping has visited Qingdao twice since 2018. He respectively attended the Qingdao Summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the maritime parade for celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Navy, giving important instructions and requirements for the work on Qingdao.
From June 9th to 10th, 2018, 18 countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization attended the Qingdao Summit. General Secretary Xi Jinping spoke highly of this summit that “the service and security work are powerful and orderly, requiring great efforts. It presents China-way, Shandong style and Qingdao characteristics to the world, reaching the world level”, and then he put forward to Qingdao the significant instruction and requirement that “hosting a successful meeting to invigorate the city”.
After the Qingdao Summit, General Secretary Xi Jinping set forth a more specific development goal for Qingdao-”Building a modern international metropolis”, which is the second sentence of the three sentences.
“This is what the general secretary come up based on Qingdao’s history, industry, region, resources, transportation and other endowments, and also the temperament that leads the times.” As multiple metropolises stand still on the globe, how Qingdao distinguishes itself from them? Hence, “openness, modernity, vitality, and fashion” are defined as the urban characteristics of Qingdao after in-depth study and understanding, extensive analysis and summary.
Wang Qingxian explained that these four words not only refer to the unification of the inner and outer aspects of urban development, but also the consistence of appearance and quality between the city and the people.
On July 24, 2019, General Secretary Xi Jinping presided over the ninth meeting of the Central Deep Reform Commission. Amid this meeting, General Secretary Xi pointed out that the construction of a China-Shanghai Cooperation Organization local economic and trade cooperation demonstration zone in Qingdao aims to establish a new internationally cooperative platform for “One Belt, One Road”.
From Wang Qingxian’s point of view, the build of a new internationally cooperative platform for “One Belt, One Road” by the Shanghai Cooperation Demonstration Zone is not just a matter among the 18 SCO countries, but to promote the bilateral and multilateral trade cooperation between the 18 SCO countries and the “Belt and Road” countries. “This has pushed Qingdao to the forefront of China’s reform and opening up.”
Based on this, Qingdao further clarified its development positioning: With a view to Jiaodong Peninsula, it gives full play to the leading role of radiation as a good development leader; to the province, it strives to build a bridgehead for Shandong Province to open up a new highland; to the country, it makes every endeavour to become a new important strategic stronghold for the country’s deeply opening up in the north of the Yangtze River, and a window to drive high-quality development with a higher level of opening in the Yellow River Basin; to the global, it should speed up the building of a new platform for international cooperation and promote resource convergence and interaction between SCO countries and countries along the belt and road, and strive to serve the new pattern of development in which domestic and international development cycles are mutually reinforcing.
“Double nodes” in a double cycle
At a symposium for entrepreneurs held on July 21, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that “a new pattern of development should be gradually formed in which the major domestic cycles play a dominant role and both domestic and international cycles promote each other”.
Qingdao is the “double node” in the double cycle connecting the north and south, through the East and west. In the development of economy, regional imbalance is the norm, and an economy should be optimized and promoted as a whole through continuous dynamic equilibrium.
At present, the gap between the north and the South in China’s regional development has become more prominent, and the national economic center has moved further to the south. In 2019, the economic aggregate of northern China accounted for only 35.2% of the country, 7.6 percentage points lower than that of 2012. Northern cities generally lack new driving forces in industries and technologies.
Why is the North not open enough? According to Wang, this is due to the lack of an open “window”. Qingdao today is a “window” for the open development of the north.
This year on January 3, president Xi hosted in the 6th meeting of the central financial committee general secretary, the research of ecological pro Shandong peninsula urban agglomeration in the Yellow River basin play a leading role in the quality development, requirements of Qingdao city core competitiveness, giving full play to the advantages of port gateway cities.
“Shenzhen and Guangzhou are at the forefront of opening up the Pearl River basin, Shanghai is the ‘window’ of opening up the Yangtze River basin, and there is a lack of cities in the Yellow River basin and even northern China that can lead the opening up,” Wang said. Based on Qingdao’s unique urban location, industrial status and linkage between land and sea, the General Secretary will act as a “window” for the opening and development of the Yellow River Basin and a new important strategic pivot for the opening and development of the northern region.
In June this year, Wang Qingxian led a party and government study delegation from Qingdao to Shanghai for study and exchange, and held the “Qingdao — Shanghai Meeting on Exchange and Cooperation in the Development of Modern Service Industry”. Focusing on the modern service industry, Qingdao values its penetration of the whole industry, the wide coverage of regional space and the strong integration of high-quality resources.
Wang hopes Shanghai will use Qingdao as an important “transit point” for the modern service industry to play its role in promoting domestic circulation, and by supporting Qingdao, it will be able to more effectively radiate the Yellow River Basin and the northern part of China.
“Learn from Shenzhen, catch up with Shenzhen”
The openness of a city is, above all, the openness of people’s minds, especially that of government officials.
On May 23, 2019, the first batch of Cadres from Qingdao went to Shenzhen to participate in the practical training. They firstly received 10 days of “market-oriented and law-based” intensive training, and then are assigned to major enterprises, investment institutions and intermediary organizations in Shenzhen for 90 days of practical training.
The training units include more than 110 enterprises such as Shenzhen Innovation Investment Group, Ping An Securities, China Resources Group, Huawei, Tencent, BYD, etc.
Wang hopes through the in-depth study, Qingdao officials should know how Shenzhen entrepreneurs deal with officials and how Shenzhen officials treat with entrepreneurs.
Wang Qingxian pointed out that by “learning from Shenzhen and catching up with Shenzhen”, Qingdao has begun to form a “new ethos” of using the logic of the market to plan things and using the power of capital to deal things.
Qingdao, a city in the process of entrepreneurship
“Qingdao is an island of youth, a city in the process of entrepreneurship, and the ‘unicorn’ of the city.”
Wang Qingxian said that Qingdao hopes to grow up together with all young entrepreneurs. Emerging industries such as industrial Internet and artificial intelligence are undertakings for young people. Qingdao is creating an entrepreneurial atmosphere to attract young people from all over the country to start their own businesses.
Starting from 2019, Qingdao has hosted the Global Venture Capital Conference for two consecutive years.
“The key to a city’s ability to attract young people is having the conditions for young people to start a business,” Wang said.
Successfully held venture capital venture capital conference for two consecutive years, Qingdao has become the new venture port that the world venture capital venture concerned about. In 2019, the total number of private equity funds in Qingdao reached 553, up 33.6% year on year and 24.1% higher than that in the whole country.
Inspired by the deep interaction between Qingdao and Shenzhen, since last year, Shenzhen enterprises have invested and cooperated 111 projects with nearly 30 billion yuan of funds in Qingdao. Shenzhen has become one of the main sources of domestic funds in Qingdao.
In the opinion of Wang Qingxian, Qingdao, relying on Haier CosmoPlat to build the “Industrial Internet Capital of the world”, is also providing a platform for young people to start businesses in Qingdao.
In the first half of this year, Qingdao overcame the impact of the epidemic, signed up 588 projects through the Internet, with a total investment of 660.88 billion yuan, most of which focused on new driving forces such as industrial Internet, smart city, robotics, artificial intelligence and new energy vehicles.
Fifteen offensives mean fifteen reforms
After repositioning the coordinates and targets and finding the gap with advanced cities, the key is to find the reform path to achieve the strategic goals. Since 2019, Qingdao has launched “15 offensives”, including economic strategy, “double recruitment and double introduction”, construction of an international shipping trade and financial innovation center, “high-end manufacturing + artificial intelligence”, technology-led city construction, and improvement of city quality, etc. Qingdao has insisted on treating the 15 offensives as 15 groups of reforms.
Qingdao has been started with manufacturing, adhering to the “industry city” development ideas, the survey found there are many traditional industries and traditional models in Qingdao, but there is not enough new industrial driving force, especially the information-based digital industry. This leads the traditional industry has not been empowered by digitalization and there is no new digital industry.
Since last year, Qingdao has been vigorously developing artificial intelligence.
“Last year, Qingdao invited AI leading companies such as Huawei, Tencent, IFLY, Shangtang Technology, Kuang Vision and Haikang Vision to Qingdao. We hope these high-tech companies can develop AI in Qingdao, cultivate engineers, turn computing power algorithms and data into products and apply them to improve efficiency of the traditional industries. And the local traditional enterprises in Qingdao are opening up their application scenarios to them, accepting the transformation of industrial Internet and artificial intelligence.” Wang Qingxian introduced.
From last year to May 8 this year, more than 500 enterprises in Qingdao opened application scenarios for AI transformation.
Qingdao port is the largest port in north China, with the world’s sixth largest throughput and seventh largest containers. But after Wang Qingxian arrived, he found out that Qingdao port is just like a porter — only to do simple transport, loading and unloading.
The offensive of building an international shipping trade and financial innovation center forced Qingdao Port to start a comprehensive transformation. On the one hand, It explored Shaanxi, Henan and Xinjiang and extended more economic hinterland. On the other hand, it will travel to Europe and Asia to open up more international routes and realize “port access to the whole world”. At the same time, Qingdao Port began to build the home port of international cruise ships and the oil supply base of the largest ship in North China… To realize the aggregation of all factors from simple logistics to people flow, business flow, capital flow, information flow and port-neighboring industry.
As Wang says, Qingdao has started to look to international shipping hubs such as London and Singapore as role models. Ultimately, what is driven by the transformation of the port is the improvement of the Qingdao city’s open energy level.
Media Contact
Qingdao Bureau of Commerce
Address：Building A, World Trade Center, 6 Xianggangzhong Road, Qingdao, China
Website：http://bofcom.qingdao.gov.cn
Qingdao investment hot-line for 24 hours: 0086–19853220207 (English)
E-mail: invest@qd.shandong.cn