Beijing's Haidian district released an action plan on May 18 to turn Zhongguancun Science City, a core area of Zhongguancun Science Park, into a cradle of global digital economy innovation in the next three years.

The action plan has laid out 92 key projects and 15 specific measures across five categories.

On the digital infrastructure front, Zhongguancun Science City in the district will build out 5G networks, the industrial internet, the satellite internet, the internet of vehicles and the internet of things, among others.

In the digital technology sphere, Zhongguancun Science City will step up research and development of core technologies in fields such as chip design, big data, cloud computing, network security and digital twin technology.

To form a high-end digital industry with its own characteristics, Zhongguancun Science City will foster innovation in digital financial services and create a pilot zone for digital currency. It will also support the digital transformation of traditional industries and the integration of advanced manufacturing and modern services.

By the end of 2023, as envisioned in the action plan, Zhongguancun Science City will have completed a number of new digital infrastructure projects with wide coverage and high performance, and taken the lead in the development of several frontier digital technologies. It will also have nurtured one or two globally competitive enterprises worth 500 billion yuan ($77.3 billion) and a group of high-performance innovation-driven companies.

The action plan was unveiled at a conference for "innovation partners" in northern Zhongguancun Science City. As Beijing's innovation hub, Haidian district has instituted an innovation partnership mechanism, where it treats local agents of innovation such as scientists, colleges, technology companies and third-party institutions as "innovation partners".

Through this mechanism, the local government mobilizes all the innovation resources it can muster to build a rainforest-like ecosystem for innovation, which provides companies with technological, financial and intellectual support that fits their needs as they advance through different phases of their life cycles.

Yu Jun, Party secretary of Haidian district, told Economic Daily that he believes what Haidian needs to do is to nurture an environment that enables innovation and build the rainforest-like innovation ecosystem, which supplies high-quality scientific and technological resources in furtherance of high-quality development.

"When the time needed to register a new business and obtain a business license is cut to one day, it is of little significance to further shorten the registration time," Yu was quoted as saying by Economic Daily. "At this time, what businesses are looking at is what kind of an environment they will be operating in and the future it holds for them."

Yu said Haidian will continue perfecting the rainforest-like innovation ecosystem and fostering new growth points to serve as a trailblazer and an exemplar for the rest of Beijing in building the city into a hub of scientific and technological innovation for the world.