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Beijing Began to Upgrade Two High-Tech Centers in Zhongguancun
The long wait for Zhongguancun has come to an end as Beijing finally began Monday to upgrade the area into the country's Silicon Valley.
The development comes one year and 15 days after China's State Council approved the city's ambitious proposal.
Opening ceremonies were held Monday for the development of the west of Zhongguancun and north of Shangdi Information Industry Base.
Boasting dozens of China's top universities like Beijing University, Qinghua University, and People's University, Zhongguancun, a subdistrict area in northwestern Beijing's Haidian District, is considered a major hope of Beijing, as well as the entire country, in development of high-tech industries.
According to Beijing Vice-Mayor Liu Zhihua, the specific development programme of the area began after complicated feasibility studies and international design bidding, and was approved by the municipal programming committee last April.
The new section, 51.55 hectares in total, will be the core area of upgraded Zhongguancun, said Liu, integrating functions of management, capital raising, information exchange, and product development, display and marketing.
Since the development will be carried out in Haidian Town, the seat of Haidian District Government, resettlement of local residents will be inevitable.
Cai Junyi, leading developer of the project, said they expect to finish the resettlement and infrastructure construction in two years. The whole project is expected to take five years.
Almost completely free of the headache of resident resettlement, the development to the north of Shangdi is expected to be completed two years earlier than Zhongguancun, though they will begin at the same time and are roughly the same size.
A development priority in Zhongguancun, Shangdi Information Industry Base was founded in 1991 as a comprehensive high-tech industrial park focusing on electronic information services. Having attracted 264 high-tech enterprises like Legend, Founder, and Huawei, Shangdi has collected an average yearly income of more than 20 billion yuan (US$2.4 billion) in the past nine years and a per hectare output value of 300 million yuan (US$36.1 million).
Having no room for newcomers, it is in great need of expansion. The new north area will accommodate about 150 more companies engaged in intellectual industries. The area will be marketed in the second half of this year.
Liu also announced that the development of some other projects listed in the development package, such as a State-level software park, a biological institution, and some dwelling districts, will be started later this year.
Also on June 20, on the 19th session of the Standing Committee of the 11th Beijing Municipal People's Congress (BMPC), committee members urged the municipal government to step up its efforts in spreading scientific knowledge, saying scientific awareness will be key to Beijing's development of high-tech industries.
They made the comment after hearing a report of Fan Boyuan, director of the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Committee, who said though all local districts and counties had allocated 0.5 yuan per person for spreading scientific knowledge, most areas did not increase the funds on a law-defined yearly rate of 20 per cent.
Over half of Beijing's 12 scientific halls are used for other reasons than spreading scientific knowledge, said Fan.
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