From village to V-Valley: Tech fuels Malanshan's cultural integration development

Malanshan Video Cultural and Creative Industrial Park. [Photo/IC]

The people's government of Wangcheng district in Changsha and the Malanshan Video Cultural and Creative Industrial Park signed a strategic cooperation agreement on Dec 26, 2025. This agreement aims to build a full-chain micro-drama industrial ecosystem and establish a national demonstration benchmark for the micro-video industry. This effort marks another key step for Hunan in deepening the integration of culture and technology.

Over the past five years, Hunan has positioned Malanshan as a key leader in developing a distinctive integration path by capitalizing on its rich cultural heritage and strong scientific and technological capabilities.

Once an urban village, Malanshan has now transformed into China's V-Valley, housing more than 4,300 enterprises and employing 64,000 talents in various industries. It has built an audio-visual lab to form a full-chain innovation system, and is currently constructing a 500P computing power data center to support technological research and development.

Malanshan has utilized digital and intelligent technologies to link the upstream and downstream sectors of the cultural industry chain. Its Cloud Malanshan unit uses artificial intelligence to restore the classic red film, Lei Feng, and the park-based Mango Digital & Intelligent's SumHi App has amassed a collection of 78,000 digital cultural relics from 98 museums around the world.

In 2024, the operating income of above-scale enterprises in Hunan's cultural and audio-visual industries exceeded 300 billion yuan ($42.27 billion) and 282.76 billion yuan, respectively, reflecting a year-on-year growth of 10 percent and 9.7 percent.

In terms of institutional and mechanism innovation, Hunan has developed a central-local collaborative research model. The region has driven the transformation of traditional industries, such as Liuyang fireworks and Liling ceramics, toward a "creativity + technology" model. It has also established a venture capital fund for cultural and technological integration and is planning the construction of Changsha University of Culture and Technology. Hunan is injecting new impetus into the Hunan chapter of Chinese modernization through the mutual empowerment of culture and technology.