Tianjin gets boost from coordinated regional growth

North China's Tianjin municipality has been committed to pushing its socioeconomic progress on a high-quality development track in the past decade, Mayor Zhang Gong said on Tuesday.

"Tianjin has optimized its industrial structure, transferred its economic growth model and resolutely given priority to quality growth during the period," Zhang said at a news conference.

The coastal city's gross domestic product in 2021 reached 1.57 trillion yuan ($227 billion), and its average annual GDP growth rate in the past decade stood at 6.1 percent, according to the news conference. Over the past 10 years, the per capita income of the city's urban residents increased on average by 7.9 percent annually, and that of its rural residents rose by 8.9 percent.

The mayor noted that the city has sharpened its competitive edge in its main economic pillar－the modern and advanced manufacturing sector.

Apart from that, local modern industries have gone full speed ahead on their development, including in information technology, biomedicine, new energy, new materials, equipment manufacturing, automobile, petroleum, chemical and aerospace and aviation.

The added value of the strategic emerging sector and that of the high-tech industry have accounted for 25.3 percent and 15.5 percent, respectively, of the combined output of industrial companies that have annual revenue of at least 20 million yuan each.

"Tianjin has seen great advancement in independent innovation. The next generation supercomputer and the national level synthetic biological innovation centers have seen major breakthroughs in the past 10 years," Zhang said.

The domestically made Phytium central processing unit and the Kylin operating system were born in Tianjin and they have helped the country break the technological bottlenecks in this field.

To boost innovation, five laboratories named after the city's mother river, the Haihe, were set up last year to boost modern traditional Chinese medicine, advanced computing and software, cell ecology, and synthetic biological and green innovation.

The city's innovation capacity has seen solid support. During the past decade, the total number of national level new and high-tech companies as well as small and medium-sized high-tech enterprises has reached more than 9,000.

The strong innovation capacity has lured leading professionals to move to Tianjin.

Statistics showed that 428,000 people have moved to Tianjin since the city launched in 2018 the Haihe Talent Plan, which has preferential policies to attract leading professionals.

Zhang said that the city has also benefited from the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

"The strategy, which de-clusters the industrial burden from Beijing, has seen 6,700 projects involving 1.14 trillion yuan channeled into Tianjin," he said.

In Tianjin's Binhai and Baodi districts, the scientific parks that have collaborations with Zhongguancun, the science hub in Beijing, have respectively seen 3,200 and 860 Beijing companies, including many leading State-owned enterprises, launch their business.

Liu Guiping, the city's vice-mayor, said that the city, as a cradle of China's modern industry, has a solid foundation to boost innovation and benefits from the presence of Tianjin Port, one of the world's largest ports in terms of loading capacity.

In addition to economic growth, the city has upgraded its protection of 875 square kilometers of wetland, established forestry and greenery on 736 sq km and rehabilitated its 153-km coastline, Liu said.