Chinese path to modernization | Common Prosperity China Practice Oriental Time and Space | News | China

CCTV news: Oriental Space Time specially planned "Chinese path to modernization - China's Practice of Common Prosperity". Realizing common prosperity has been a dream pursued by Chinese people for thousands of years. Today, in the process of comprehensively promoting Chinese path to modernization, we have more complete conditions for achieving common prosperity. The report of the Twentieth National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasized that Chinese path to modernization is the modernization of common prosperity for all people. "Achieving common prosperity for all people" is one of the essential requirements of Chinese path to modernization.

What kind of common prosperity does China need? How to achieve common prosperity? Zhejiang, which is developing and constructing a demonstration zone for common prosperity with high quality, shoulders the heavy responsibility and mission of exploring the way for the whole country. On June 10, 2021, the Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Supporting the High quality Development and Construction of Demonstration Zones for Common Prosperity in Zhejiang were officially released, proposing a "two-step" development goal: by 2025, Zhejiang Province will make significant and substantial progress in promoting the construction of demonstration zones for common prosperity through high-quality development; By 2035, Zhejiang Province will achieve greater achievements in high-quality development and basically achieve common prosperity.

Two years have passed, and as a pioneer in exploring common prosperity, what progress and achievements has Zhejiang made? What meaningful practices can be explored for other places to learn from? Starting from today, in 5 days, "Eastern Time and Space" will take you to find answers from the frontline practice of solidly promoting common prosperity in Zhejiang.

General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that if China wants to achieve common prosperity, it is not to engage in egalitarianism, but to make the "cake" bigger first, and then divide the "cake" through reasonable institutional arrangements, so that the tide rises and the boat gets its place, so that the fruits of development can be more achieved. More and more equitable benefit all the people.

To make the cake bigger and better, high-quality economic development is the only way. Let's first take a look at the exploration of high-quality development in Zhejiang.

This year, the Zhejiang system has deployed three "number one projects" for high-quality development - the "number one development project" for digital economy innovation and improvement, the "number one reform project" for optimizing and improving the business environment, and the "sweet potato economy" for upgrading and enhancing the "number one open project". Comprehensive breakthroughs have been made in the three major areas of innovation, reform, and opening up. In 2022, the proportion of digital economy added value to GDP and the level of digital comprehensive development in Zhejiang Province ranked first in the country.

Building a Solid Foundation for Common Prosperity by Adding Numbers to Development

This is an industrial park in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. At around 8 pm, the workers on the production line had already finished work, and the entire park had no lights in the factory except for corridor lighting. Is no one staying up late and working overtime an unsaturated production for a company? Of course not, their orders are actually increasing every year. Why didn't you rush to work? It's not that we didn't rush the work, everyone inside is busy. However, it is not workers but machines who are working.

12000 square meters, 16 production lines operate at high speed, and there is no need to turn on lights 24 hours a day. By replacing manual labor with machines, intelligent factories have increased the efficiency of production lines from 10000 units per day to 50000 units per day, and the product qualification rate has increased to 99%. There are already 653 intelligent factories like this in Zhejiang Province, and the coverage rate of digital transformation for small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises has reached 72.6%. The industry digitalization index has ranked first in the country for three consecutive years. In 2022, the added value of core digital economy industries in Zhejiang Province reached 897.7 billion yuan, becoming a solid foundation for common prosperity.

At several big data centers in Zhejiang Province, the servers are still working at 8 pm. There are 155 data centers like this in Zhejiang Province, with a total computing power of 886 billion floating-point operations per second. Simply put, the data centers in Zhejiang Province work together for one hour, which is equivalent to the workload of approximately 8 billion people worldwide for tens of thousands of years. These servers carry people's daily online computing, as well as artificial intelligence, metaverse, and so on. The booming development of the digital economy has provided opportunities for 26 mountainous counties in Zhejiang to catch up and make progress. In the first quarter of 2023, the added value of the manufacturing industry, a core digital economy industry above designated size in 26 mountainous counties of Zhejiang Province, increased by 32.7%, far exceeding the average of 8.7% in the province.

"Red Lady" Zhao Hongyi: Staring at the Production Line and Leading "Marriage"

The development of the digital economy is not isolated, but needs to be integrated and embedded into industrial development, technological innovation, and various enterprise operations. A good business environment is the soil for its better innovative development. Therefore, optimizing and improving the business environment is another key direction for Zhejiang to focus on this year.

On this bird's-eye view of Tongxiang Economic Development Zone in Jiaxing, Zhejiang, you can see many densely packed small grids. One small grid represents a company, and this development zone has gathered nearly a thousand companies. When the government introduces them, it hopes for industrial agglomeration, allowing physical agglomeration to generate chemical effects.

During frontline research, the reporter found that these enterprises living in the same "community" are like newly relocated homeowners in the city, even neighbors who are door-to-door do not know each other, let alone cooperate.

How to connect the "last mile" of industrial chain agglomeration? Let's get to know a matchmaker who bridges the way for business cooperation. She is Zhao Hongyi, a grassroots cadre in the development zone.

These two enterprises in Tongxiang, Zhejiang are separated by two streets from each other, but they did not know each other before. Shuanghuan Transmission Company, which is engaged in automobile equipment production, needs to run hundreds of kilometers or even further to order the required packaging boxes. Now, they learned that the nearby Zhengji Plastics Industry produces this type of packaging box, so the two sides reached an agreement and established a cooperation, which saves time, effort, and money. It was Zhao Hongyi, the deputy director of the Economic Development Zone, who matched them. As a grassroots civil servant, Zhao Hongyi has been working here for ten years. Because his responsibilities are related to the economy, he often has to deal with enterprises in his jurisdiction.

Previously, Shuanghuan Transmission Company spent over 2 million yuan per year on purchasing packaging boxes when going out of town. Now, under the guidance of Zhao Hongyi, the company has found a supplier at its doorstep, which not only saves costs but also improves after-sales speed. Zhao Hongyi further thought that if more enterprises with such upstream and downstream relationships could be found locally to help them establish connections, it would greatly promote the development and growth of the entire development zone. So, Zhao Hongyi decided to become the "matchmaker" between enterprises.

Zhao Hongyi, Deputy Director of Tongxiang Economic Development Zone in Jiaxing City: Being a "matchmaker" is a matter of mutual assistance and coordination in the industrial chain. Find new development directions, new customers, and new suppliers for the enterprise.

In order to establish connections between enterprises as soon as possible, relying solely on word-of-mouth is not enough. The first step of Tongxiang is to build an industrial chain mutual aid platform by using the Internet. Enterprises can independently match upstream and downstream industrial chain cooperation enterprises through the platform to release information such as profiles and product and procurement needs.

Zhao Hongyi, Deputy Director of Tongxiang Economic Development Zone in Jiaxing City, Zhejiang Province: The industrial mutual aid platform is equivalent to a preliminary introduction platform. Whether the products of both companies can preliminarily match the matching degree of our industrial docking, some detailed things may not be explained so clearly. For example, if there are some technical issues, such as whether the product specifications and models can match with customers or downstream, further offline coordination is needed.

Not long ago, a high-voltage wire harness produced by a local company was undergoing live road testing at another automotive company. This is a project that Zhao Hongyi mediated a year ago. From the intention to cooperate to the formation of a supply and demand relationship, this "matchmaker" has been involved in many matchmaking and coordination efforts.

Jin Yafeng, President of Zhejiang Fraser Energy Co., Ltd.: It's not like matchmakers get married just by matchmaking. Throughout the process, they have been paying attention to our matter. If there are any problems, difficulties, or communication needs, a phone call can quickly help us implement them.

Peng Yiding, Procurement Manager of Zhejiang Hezhong Automobile's Three Electric Appliances: The road test verification has been completed now. We will go to their side again to conduct a factory audit of their production line, tooling, and equipment, which is equivalent to an on-site audit. After the audit is completed, mass production can basically proceed.

This kind of matchmaking is not only between local enterprises. At present, Tongxiang City has attracted nearly a hundred new energy vehicle related enterprises to land here through investment attraction.

Zhao Hongyi, Deputy Director of Tongxiang Economic Development Zone in Jiaxing City: This is a planning and layout map of the entire industry in our Tongxiang Economic Development Zone, with a total of over a thousand enterprises on the map. Our staff travels between these enterprises every day to understand what they have and what they need. There is a company that produces new energy vehicle vehicles, a company that produces new energy vehicle transmissions, and a company that produces wheel hubs. We believe that these three companies can form an upstream and downstream supply chain relationship, and with our efforts, the two companies have recently started to connect with each other.

How can Zhejiang achieve the "sweet potato economy" with more cultivation?

This year, Zhejiang also proposed the implementation of the "No.1 Open Project" to enhance and upgrade the "sweet potato economy". What is the "sweet potato economy"?Here, local enterprises in Zhejiang are vividly compared to "sweet potatoes", and the industries and markets that enterprises extend domestically and internationally are the "vines of sweet potatoes".

The "sweet potato economy" is a high growth model formed by innovation in Zhejiang, where both the market and resources are at the same time. For over 20 years, the "vines" of Zhejiang enterprises have been continuously extending to the whole country and even around the world. Nowadays, the "sweet potato economy" has entered the 3.0 era, and more and more Zhejiang enterprises are going out, growing stronger and rooted deeper in Zhejiang.

So what kind of "sweet potato effect" can companies bring when going global? In the new era, what kind of "new sweet potatoes" are growing in Zhejiang?

Not long ago, the Industrial Development Group in Qiantang District, Hangzhou, Zhejiang completed the site selection of its overseas headquarters in Singapore.

Yao Chenpeng, Chairman of the Industrial Development Group in Qiantang District, Hangzhou City: Go to regions where global technological capabilities and talents are relatively concentrated, and seek to connect with local resources to enhance the innovation power of these enterprises for further development.

The platform that Qiantang District Industrial Development Group is preparing to build is to provide services for domestic enterprises to set up research and development laboratories overseas, help these enterprises gather overseas talents, conduct technical research and development overseas, and then develop new products and markets for the "sweet potato" rooted in China. This can be said to be an exploration of Zhejiang's "new sweet potato economy". However, if enterprises go global, it can also be said to be a loss of local capital to a certain extent. So, why does Zhejiang still strive to let enterprises go global?

Zhang Hongman, Vice President of Ningbo Xingrui Technology: The land in Zhejiang has formed a layout of seven mountains, one water, and two fields, especially industrial land and population resources are very limited. For our company, we definitely need to go out and do some global production capacity layout.

What will encouraging enterprises to go global, and even "joining forces to go global", bring to the local area of Zhejiang? Huali Group, which has helped more than 250 companies set up factories overseas and established 6 economic and trade cooperation zones overseas, has calculated an account for us.

Zhang Guifang, Overseas Vice President of Huali Group: We have also found that for every $1 product produced locally, $0.6 of the product is actually exported through upstream components, raw materials, and key components of the domestic parent company. That is to say, it can effectively and indirectly drive the export of domestic parent companies.

The development model of "going out together" has enabled the roots and stems of "sweet potatoes" to grow larger and stronger, enhancing their competitiveness in the international market, and also providing a window for transformation and upgrading for the Zhejiang headquarters. Over the past decade, Xingrui Technology, which has been focusing on the production of precision electronic components, has successively established factories in countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam. Its products have expanded from four or five export countries to 18 countries now. After the products with high demand but low profits were moved overseas with lower labor costs, the production line of the headquarters was also updated in a timely manner.

At the end of May this year, a China Europe freight train loaded with photovoltaic modules departed from Yiwu West Station in Zhejiang Province to Uzbekistan. The shipper will provide products for the construction of a local power station with approximately 880000 photovoltaic panels, with a total project price exceeding 2 billion yuan. And for export trade like this, in the first four months, Zhejiang exceeded one trillion yuan. Among them, new energy vehicles, lithium batteries, and solar cells have become the three fastest growing export products.

Professor Lu Jing from the School of Economics at Zhejiang University: 20 years ago, our exports were mainly focused on light industrial products. Zhejiang was called "light, small, integrated, and integrated", which includes light industrial commodities, small commodities, and block economy. 20 years later, we are at a critical stage of transforming old and new driving forces, and the economic growth momentum of the entire Zhejiang Province is driven by innovation and technological development.

In May of this year, Zhejiang began to further enhance and upgrade the "sweet potato economy". Under the new situation, what kind of "new sweet potatoes" will Zhejiang plant again? The Qiantang District Industrial Development Group mentioned earlier has helped many domestic enterprises establish research and development laboratories in the United States by building innovation centers in North America.

Liu Ning, the head of the California Bay Area branch of Sanhua Group Automotive Parts: With the innovation center established in the United States, we are able to establish teams locally and have frequent contact with customers and the market. We have absorbed many advanced concepts and technological demands from around the world in the field of new energy vehicles, combined with our own technological accumulation, to develop more and better products suitable for both local and global markets.

To ensure the sustainable development of the "sweet potato economy", it is not only necessary to increase and improve quality, but also to explore deeper levels. Next, Zhejiang will move from following and accompanying others to leading the way, making the world's best products and mastering the core discourse power of the industrial chain.

Chen Fangfang, Dean of Zhejiang Business Research Institute: How to promote this technology to the world, how to better sell products to the world, how to use my own development to drive the development of the entire industry in the world, we need to help or support enterprises to do some systematic opening, that is, how to form standards in new fields, and how to elevate some new practices and new formats to universal standards worldwide.

Innovative Development Strategies for Common Prosperity and Expanding the Cake of Common Prosperity

What kind of inspiration and regular understanding does Zhejiang give us in the pursuit of high-quality development and exploration of common prosperity?

The premise of common prosperity is to get rich first and make the cake bigger. How to understand the logic of common prosperity in Zhejiang's innovative development of digital economy and "sweet potato economy"?

Associate Professor Hao Dong from the Central Party School: High quality development is the foundation for building common prosperity. Development is the top priority for governing and revitalizing the country, and technological innovation occupies a core position in the overall modernization construction. How to unify the top priority and core position? Our answer is high-quality development.

What kind of "high quality" do we need to achieve common prosperity, and how do we understand this "high quality"?

Hao Dong, Associate Professor of the Central Party School: High quality development has shifted from being mainly driven by factors in the past to being mainly driven by innovation now. What do we rely on to stimulate the factors of total productivity in the process of promoting common prosperity? It relies on innovation. So high-quality development is a development that relies on innovation investment. Empowering development through innovation, taking innovation as the most important element of evaluation in the way of development, the driving force of development, and the evaluation criteria of development, to achieve development from the past "whether it is good or not" to the present "whether it is good or not", and from the past "relying on speed" to the present "relying on quality".