Digital economy drives high-quality development in E China’s Zhejiang

In recent years, Zhejiang Province, an e-commerce heartland in east China, has made positive progress in driving high-quality economic and social development through its thriving digital economy.

People visit the City Brain Operation Command Center in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, April 13, 2020. (Xinhua/Huang Zongzhi)

Last year, the added value for core industries of Zhejiang’s digital economy reached 702 billion yuan (about $108.6 billion), up 13 percent year-on-year. The province invested 113.39 billion yuan in 528 key digital economy projects. The overall usage of the city brain system in Hangzhou, a project launched to help the province’s capital city improve urban management by leveraging cutting-edge technologies, reached a total of 3.56 billion individual access commands. Zhejiang also built 210 provincial industrial Internet platforms and developed nearly 30,000 industrial apps, with more than 410,000 enterprises embracing cloud computing.

Digital transformation has promoted the high-quality development of private companies in Zhejiang, which serves as a private business hub in China.

A leading Chinese socket maker, Bull Group, based in Cixi city in the province is one of the companies that has benefitted from the digital transformation of its logistics system. “The transformation enables us to deliver 60,000 boxes of products per day, an increase from 3,000 boxes, and has also dramatically reduced human errors,” said Chang Zhan, logistics manager of the group.

Digital transformation has also made cities in Zhejiang smarter in terms of their urban governance. In Wuzhen town in the province, a city brain system has greatly improved urban management. For example, snapshots obtained from cameras connected to the system can identify problems such as individual drivers running red lights as well as illegal and inappropriate parking, which then provides automatic reporting to a control center, which will in turn notify relevant personnel to resolve these problems as soon as possible.