China Focus: How innovation props up China's high-quality development

BEIJING -- Sci-tech innovation has played a decisive role in promoting China's high-quality development and modernization drive, just as President Xi Jinping emphasized at the ongoing "two sessions," an important political event concerning the country's further development. Facing fierce global competitions, China must open up new areas and new tracks in development and foster new growth drivers and new strengths, which, fundamentally, depends on sci-tech innovation, said Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, while attending a deliberation with his fellow deputies from the delegation of Jiangsu Province at the first session of the 14th National People's Congress, the top legislature, on Sunday. Over the past five years, China fully implemented the innovation-driven development strategy and improved and upgraded the industrial structure, said the government work report submitted Sunday to the national legislature for deliberation. Intelligent manufacturing is a main technical route and an inevitable option for the innovative development, industrial upgrading, and high-quality development of China's manufacturing industry, said Zhou Ji, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering.