Guizhou sets ambitious goals at 'two sessions'

Deputies attending the second session of the 13th Guizhou People's Congress, which began on Jan 27. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

The second session of the 13th Guizhou People's Congress began on Jan 27 and Guizhou Governor Shen Yiqin delivered the 2019 Guizhou Government Work Report during the opening ceremony, sharing the province's targets for the new year.

According to the report, Guizhou will adhere to six principles throughout the new year: hard work, increased stability, taking risks, economic improvement primarily through poverty-relief, balance between economic development and environmental protection, and innovation-driven development.

The report highlights 2019 as a key year in Guizhou's battle against poverty and sets forth poverty alleviation goals in six fields: industrial revolution in rural areas, poverty relief and allocation, infrastructure, a focus on areas with severe poverty, the integration of poverty-relief resources and investment in poverty relief.

In 2019, Guizhou aims to develop its industries and increase their economic output to at least 1.2 trillion yuan ($178.31 billion), carry out more than 60 civil-military integration projects and reduce costs for economic enterprises by about 40 billion yuan.

The economic output of several industries, such as the chemical, alcohol, tobacco, basic materials and new construction material industries, are expected to exceed one hundred billion yuan.

The report urges Guizhou to advance the development of big data and accelerate the construction of the Guiyang 5G pilot network comprehensive demonstration project.

In 2019, Guizhou also plans to accelerate the development of big data centers opened by Huawei, Apple and Tencent and increase the main revenue and online retail sales of above-scale software and IT services by 18 percent.

In 2018, Guizhou achieved impressive results in opening up the government big data platform, and in 2019 it will continue to promote the integration of various data, the improvement of the single-platform system for dealing with a variety of issues, the development of service databases for electronic certificates and public credit, and becoming a pilot province for the integration of national social credit and big data. All open data from various governmental levels across Guizhou are expected to be connected via Guizhou-Cloud Big Data.

To achieve the above goals, Guizhou plans to upgrade its big data infrastructure in 2019. The province plans to increase its telecommunication optical fiber cables to one million kilometers, install 10,000 4G networks for villages made up of at least 30 households and invest 12 billion yuan in infrastructure construction.

In 2019, Guizhou plans to launch many major projects related to intelligent automobiles and herbal extraction, and establish another national high-tech zone, two provincial high-tech zones and 400 high-tech enterprises. It will also strengthen laws on the protection of intellectual property rights.

The service sector will also be key to the province's development, as it plans to establish 300 new service enterprises and aims to increase total tourism revenue and the number of visitors by 30 percent.

While pursuing economic development, Guizhou will also emphasize protection of the natural environment. It has decided to develop 5.2 million mu (346,667 hectares) of forests and 3.5 million mu of afforested farmland, and restore 1,000 square meters of deserts and 2,520 sq m of land suffering from water and soil loss.