Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday urged Shanghai, the country’s financial and trade center, to continue serving as a vanguard and pioneer in reform and innovation. Xi’s remarks were also seen as a bugle for further reform and innovation across the country.

Xi stressed that the courage to continue reform and pioneering spirit to innovate is especially important as China, the country standing at the beginning year of its 13th Five Year Plan, strives to build itself into a moderately prosperous society.

Xi made the remarks when he joined a panel meeting of Shanghai deputies, who were deliberating the government's work report, at the ongoing annual session of the National People's Congress. Shanghai should tap its courageous, pioneering spirit and youthful vigor to be innovative in the way it advances reform, Xi said, calling on the city to serve as a "pioneer" in this regard.

He urged the city to put into practice the innovative, coordinated, green, open and sharing developmental philosophy, and strengthen systematic integration of measures for comprehensively deepening reforms. Supply-side structural reform should be given priority, according to him.

Xi also emphasized “innovative development” when he attended the deliberating meeting of the coastal city in the past three years. The city, often chosen as testing ground for new opening-up policies, has put Xi’s requirements into practice by introducing reform and innovation strategies.

Shanghai’s economic growth is now picking up, and the growth of strategic emerging industries has greatly outpaced that of the traditional ones. With service sector contributing to 67 percent of its total output value, its economy no longer relies on heavy chemical industry, real estate or traditional processing industries.

Besides Shanghai, the rest of China is embracing an entrepreneurship and innovation wave.

In this year’s government report delivered by Premier Li Keqiang, the word "innovation" was mentioned 61 times, up from 38 times in last year's version. The report vowed to build national science centers and technological innovation hubs, and help develop internationally competitive enterprises, pledging that by 2020, China's R&D investment will account for 2.5 percent of the GDP.

It also promised a 60 percent increase in the contribution of scientific and technological advances to economic growth.

Moreover, it emphasized that platforms will be created for crowd innovation, crowd support, crowd-sourcing, and crowd-funding, and mechanisms will be built to encourage new types of business start-ups and innovation through cooperation between enterprises, institutions of higher learning, research institutes, and makers.

“We will establish demonstration centers for business startups and innovation and encourage the development of a business startup service industry as well as angel investment, venture capital, industrial investment and other investment,” the report added.

Besides, China will also adopt more active, open and effective policies to attract talent from overseas. Many efforts were also made to encourage innovation previously. Premier Li Keqiang proposed a strategy of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" at the Summer Davos Forum in 2014.

Since May, 2013, at least 22 documents have been released by the central government to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. Concrete measures were also introduced.

The Central Economic Work Conference held at the end of 2015 also made clear that China will continue to implement the strategy of innovation-driven development and promote mass entrepreneurship and innovation.

Reform and innovation will inspire creativity and new growth engines while facilitating upgrading in traditional industries and growth in emerging ones, said the statement issued after the conference. In 2015, China saw a 21.6 percent rise in the number of newly registered enterprises, which means that 12,000 startups were set up every day in the year.