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Eastern China’s Hefei becomes home to country’s first advanced tech application centre amid growing competition with Shenzhen
- The Advanced Technology Application and Promotion Centre represents a major national initiative located in Hefei, capital of eastern Anhui province
- The centre will serve as a kind of brain thrust to support the country’s vast downstream manufacturing apparatus
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Ben Jiangin Beijing
Hefei, capital of eastern Anhui province, has become home to the Advanced Technology Application and Promotion Centre (ATAPC), a new initiative formed by the central government to pull together resources needed for various state-of-the-art tech programmes.
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The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the economic planning agency under China’s State Council, and Hefei’s municipal government made the joint announcement on Sunday. The centre’s focus includes unmanned systems on air, sea and land; a trading and reservation platform for various electronic components and semiconductors; and an e-prescription and drug-transaction settlement system.
This comes more than a week after Hefei hosted the 2022 World Conference on Integrated Circuits, which was jointly organised by the Anhui provincial government and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
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The NDRC announcement, however, has come as a surprise because the southern tech hub of Shenzhen in January was given autonomy to set up a global trading platform to support real-world applications of the latest scientific developments, which followed the city’s designation in 2019 as location of the country’s fourth major national science centre.
The ATAPC, which will serve as a kind of brain thrust to support the nation’s vast downstream manufacturing apparatus, signifies the central government’s mandate to build up the hi-tech research capacity in Anhui, according to Wang Qingxian, governor of the province.
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