SW China's Chongqing makes strides in building itself into smart city

A woman plays "Go," or "Weiqi", with a robot during the Smart China Expo 2022 in southwest China's Chongqing, Aug. 22, 2022. [Xinhua/Tang Yi]

Through the platform of the annual Smart China Expo, southwest China's Chongqing Municipality has made steady progress in building itself into a smart manufacturing heartland and a renowned smart city.

The 2022 Smart China Expo kicked off in the municipality on Aug. 22 under the theme of "Smart Technology: Empowering Economy, Enriching Life."

During the three-day tech event, the Chongqing Pavilion displays over 90 application scenarios in eight areas, including smart transport, smart communities, and ecological protection.

At present, Chongqing has built 244 smart communities, 425 smart schools, 41 smart tourism destinations (or resorts), 39 smart rural tourism destinations, and 57 smart hospitals.

Since the first Smart China Expo was held in Chongqing in 2018, the expo has increasingly come to demonstrate expanding spillover effects.

Driven by the expo, the municipality's digital economy is now booming. The city has 1,704 enterprises above the designated size in the core industries of the digital economy, with the added value of the digital economy growing at an average rate of 16 percent per year. By the end of 2021, the municipality's digital economy contributed to 27.2 percent of its GDP.

Last year, hi-tech industries and strategic emerging industries in Chongqing accounted for 19.1 percent and 28.9 percent of the added value of industrial enterprises above the designated size, respectively.

Meanwhile, Chongqing is home to 131 enterprises that provide Industrial Internet services. More than 110,000 enterprises based in the municipality have engaged in China's various cloud-based big data and artificial intelligence initiatives.

The municipality has so far built over 70,000 5G base stations. The Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle is home to one of the eight national computing hubs of China's project to channel computing resources from the east to the west. Chongqing is also one of the five national Industrial Internet hubs in the country.

The Smart China Expo has brought a series of projects and technologies to Chongqing over the past four years, with 10 heads of international organizations, 73 academicians and experts from China and abroad, and 53 executives of Fortune Global 500 companies having meanwhile also participated in previous expos, offering new perspectives and inspiration for the intelligent development of the municipality and even the whole of China's vast western region.