Jilin Province to Build "Optical Valley"China has started to build an optical electronics industrial park in this capital of Jilin Province, in the northeast.The park, to cover 2,120,000 sq m, will focus on the optical electronics, instruments and information technology industries. It will include development and research buildings, office buildings, workshops for making optical materials and precision instruments. The park, nicknamed "optical valley", is being set up by the Institute of Optical Precision Machinery and Physics, the branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Changchun and the Changchun Economic Development Zone. With a total investment budget of 18 billion yuan (about 2.2 billion US dollars), the park will be constructed by two phases over a period of five years and hopes to achieve a yearly revenue of more than 30 billion yuan (about 3.6 billion US dollars) after completion. Wang Daheng, a leading optical scientist, said that the park will be a center of the national research on optics and trade in related products. It will also, hopefully, become a research and production base of optical devices and an exchange center for international scientific communications. Analysts said that the country's optical electronics industry will create 5,000 billion US dollars in revenue within this century. Meanwhile, other cities in China, such as Shanghai, Wuhan and Guangzhou, are now constructing "optical valleys" of their own. |
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