No shortage of tech inventors and innovators in the city, but it is hard to commercialise their products
Ronald Pong watched with dismay as some Hong Kong cabbies carried out undercover sting operations recently to expose Uber drivers who did not have permits to pick up passengers.
The taxi drivers’ frustration with competition from the popular ride-hailing platform has festered for years, but the angry confrontation was also a sign of what was holding Hong Kong back in the global race to embrace technology.
Shanghai's "International Digital Sea" project, a smart digital city in Fengxian District, will soon launch its initial phase, offering a glimpse of future urban life.
The project is the top priority in Fengxian New City, one of Shanghai's "five new cities." It covers about 1.4 square kilometers and is planned to be completed in seven phases over 10 years. It aims to create three digital cities – above ground, underground, and in the cloud.
Read more: CN: Shanghai: Fengxian's Digital Sea project set to launch initial phase
China will ratchet up resources to speed up the construction of digital infrastructure, bolster the digital transformation of the economy and society, and deepen reforms related to the market-oriented allocation of data elements, as part of a broader push to develop new quality productive forces and advance the building of a "Digital China", officials and experts said.
Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang said more efforts should be made to give full play to China's advantages in terms of its massive data scale and rich application scenarios, and unleash the value of data elements so as to create new growth momentum for the country's high-quality development.
China's emphasis on promoting the development of smart cities and urban digital transformation is expected to bolster the innovative growth of the digital economy, help foster new quality productive forces and push forward the modernization of urban governance systems and capacity, officials and experts said.
Noting that data serve as the foundation and core element of the digital economy, they called for more efforts to promote the exploitation and opening up of data, as well as the efficient circulation and use of data elements, while expanding the application scenarios for data in more key fields.
A month-long information consumption festival was launched in Shanghai on Friday by the municipal government in an effort to accelerate developing new-quality productive forces and build cutting-edge digital industry clusters with international competitiveness, according to official sources.
"Information consumption is a new consumption model in the digital economy era that focuses on interaction and experience between producers and consumers, featuring greater stability and durability," said Wu Lijian, deputy director of the standing committee of Shanghai's Huangpu district's people's congress during the opening ceremony of the festival.
Read more: CN: Shanghai launches information consumption festival to boost digital economy