Stories of High-Quality Development | Productive forces undergoing upgrading

What are new quality productive forces? Why and how should they be developed?

While taking part in the "Stories of High-Quality Development" program hosted by People's Daily, Wang Yiming, vice chairman of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, noted that in the face of a new round of scientific and technological revolution and the deepening of industrial transformation, China needs to break away from the path of productivity development that has been characterized by extensive expansion and inefficient development under the traditional growth mode, and at the same time expand the space for the development of advanced productive forces. Cultivating and developing new quality productive forces with scientific and technological innovation at its core is the only way to open up new paths and inject new momentum into high-quality development.

Revolutionary technical breakthrough

When we talk about automated factories, you might imagine scenes with unmanned forklifts gliding smoothly through a stereoscopic warehouse, robotic arms swinging up and down along the production line, and humanoid robots performing various tasks autonomously without instructions. In automated factories, robotic arms have been equipped with "brains" and "eyes," becoming invaluable assistants to production.

"In the future, with our Mech-GPT universal multimodal large model, even people without a technical background will be able to instruct robots to perform tasks simply by speaking to them. Robots will become as accessible and useful to everyone as smartphones," said Shao Tianlan, founder of Mech-Mind Robotics Technologies Ltd.

The in-depth integration of intelligent technologies with manufacturing has given rise to an intelligent manufacturing model where humans and machines collaborate. This model enables dynamic perception, interconnection, data integration, and intelligent control throughout the entire manufacturing process, accelerating the formation of new quality productive forces, said Wang.

Innovative allocation of production factors

In mines 900 meters underground, there are more cameras than workers. At Shandong Energy Group, there are over 800 cameras on average in each mine.

According to Zhou Jianpeng, the deputy general manager of Yunding Technology, Shandong Energy Group, in the underground operation area, visual recognition technology is replacing the traditional mode of "people watching people." AI has become a "safety officer" 24 hours on duty.

In the past, people often likened coal to "black gold." Today, what is extracted along with coal is vast amounts of data. For instance, data on coal washing processes and technical parameters as well as videos of pressure relief drilling scenarios serve as material for training AI, enhancing the models generalization capabilities, and optimizing business processes.

Wang said that data possesses characteristics of high fluidity, low replication costs, and increasing returns. By integrating data into the allocation of production factors, we can achieve a more efficient output without significantly increasing traditional factor inputs.

This integration enhances production efficiency and fosters the emergence of new quality productive forces.

Deep industrial transformation and upgrading

Birds are singing and flowers are blooming outside the "lights-out" cold rolling factory of Baoshan Iron & Steel Co., Ltd. (Bao Steel). Inside the factory, robots work round the clock. This is a far cry from the traditional idea of a noisy steel factory. Here, more than half of the production capacity is used to produce a new generation of automotive steel, including low-carbon emission automotive steel plate.

From high emissions and energy consumption to the improvement of the "green quotient" of production and the quality of production, a steel plate's story at Bao Steel is becoming even more remarkable. According to Bao Ping, a chief engineer at Bao Steel, the ultra-low carbon emission steel, manufactured using electric furnace smelting of all scrap steel, can cut carbon dioxide emissions by 60 percent across the entire process.

"Green is an important feature of new quality productive forces that I have personally experienced," said Bao.

"New quality productive forces are not limited to emerging industries. Traditional industries, through technological transformation and deep restructuring, can also become the main breeding ground for cultivating new quality productive forces," said Wang.

Wang pointed out in developing new quality productive forces, we need to "prevent a headlong rush into projects and the formation of industry bubbles, and avoid adopting just a single model of development." It's necessary to properly handle a number of relationships: the relationship between sci-tech innovations and the transformation of sci-tech achievements, the relationship between developing emerging industries and upgrading traditional industries, the relationship between government guidance and the role of market mechanisms, the relationship among sci-tech innovation, industrial innovation and financial support, the relationship between developing new quality productive forces and revising production relations, and the relationship between cultivating high-level talents for innovation and improving workers' capabilities.

The endeavor to develop new quality productive forces represents a proactive transformation driving China's high-quality economic development and a strategic choice to gain an advantage in the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, Wang said. In recent years, China has achieved fruitful scientific and technological innovation, made progress in innovation-driven development, demonstrated the effectiveness of green and low-carbon transformation, and accelerated the pace of the new development mode's transformation. New quality productive forces have been nurtured and grown through China's practice of promoting high-quality development, and have shown to be strong supports and driving forces for high-quality development.