Heilongjiang leverages advantages to grow

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Modern agriculture, upgraded industry, winter tourism and high-tech feature in current, future development plans

Heilongjiang has an intrinsic advantage when it comes to hosting the 2022 World 5G Convention and will seize the opportunity to strengthen cooperation with the world's top experts and entrepreneurs in the digital economy, officials said on Thursday.

The event will kick off in Harbin, the provincial capital, on August 10.

"The World 5G Conference is the world's first international 5G event and a platform for professional international exchange and cooperation. It will build a bridge of communication for inter-regional industrial cooperation and linkage, Lu Yuchun, deputy director of the Provincial Development and Reform Commission, told a news conference on Thursday.

"In recent years, the provincial government has placed great importance on the development of the digital economy and has firmly grasped the development trends of the new generation of information technology," he said. "The 13th Communist Party of China Heilongjiang Congress made the deployment of the digital economy a new engine of development, beginning a new chapter in the development of the province's digital economy."

Heilongjiang is focused on four particular sectors: the digital economy, the biological economy, the winter sports economy and the creative design economy.

According to the Provincial Digital Economy Development Plan for the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), the added value of core digital economy industries will account for more than 10 percent of the province's GDP by 2025.

So far, all administrative villages in Heilongjiang have 4G network coverage, with 5G coverage in 13 cities, 127 counties and 1,481 townships.

The digitalization rate for key business links stands at 24.5 percent, for processes at 33.7 percent and for manufacturing equipment at 39.3 percent.

The province is also home to some 300 universities and scientific research institutions, including the Harbin Institute of Technology, that possess a strong innovation and research capacity in the digital economy.