Technology to empower country's urban and rural areas

Fifth-generation technology, an important driving force behind the nation's massive new infrastructure construction, will bring substantial changes to the nation's urban development and rural revitalization, said participants at the two sessions, which wrapped up in Beijing late last month.

"To better promote 5G application, construction of 5G stations should be accelerated in a well-balanced manner," said Zheng Jie, a deputy to the 13th National People's Congress and president of the Zhejiang branch of China Mobile, adding that his company has so far launched over 28,000 5G stations throughout Zhejiang province, ranking first in the nation.

Zheng said that by the end of this year, the Zhejiang branch of China Mobile will put into use 40,000 5G stations to further expand 5G coverage in the province.

"5G will definitely add new vitality to sound economic and social development in China through applications and interactivity integrating VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality) and MR (mixed reality)," Zheng said.

All these will provide ample development potential to areas of home entertainment, retail, education, healthcare, travel and gaming sectors, Zheng added.

For example, in the medical sector, the Zhejiang branch teamed up with the second affiliated hospital of the Zhejiang University School of Medicine earlier this year to launch the nation's first remote emergency medical command center, enabling doctors to undertake real-time medical consultations and ultrasound checks, which greatly facilitated the recent fight against COVID-19.

Chen Aizhu, another NPC deputy and a village head from Pingyang county, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, said 5G will help drive construction of Smart Villages in the nation's ongoing rural revitalization campaign.

"Though China has mapped out a development strategy to boost the informatization of rural areas by 2025, the big-data sector and smart technologies are still far from being deeply integrated with the real rural economy," Chen said.

She raised a proposal at this year's NPC meetings that the pace of development of digitalization and informatization should be enhanced to push ahead basic infrastructure construction in rural areas, especially in sectors such as the internet of things and agricultural work.

China is expected to have about 150 million 5G mobile subscribers by the end of this year, as the nation scrambles to accelerate construction of new infrastructure, including 5G base stations, said Liu Duo, another NPC deputy and head of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, on May 25.