Guangdong Governor Huang Huahua says he hopes that Shenzhen, already possessing a thriving high-tech industry, will become a model for innovation in the province.

On Tuesday Huang, who is now in Beijing for the ongoing National People's Congress, encouraged Shenzhen to continue to take the province's lead in boosting the high-tech industry, encouraging and supporting self-innovation initiatives, and thus do its part in building an innovation-oriented Guangdong.

He gave Shenzhen the thumbs-up for its high-tech output, which accounted for half of the city's total output in 2005. Shenzhen currently owns the intellectual property rights to 58 percent of its high-tech products.

Guangdong's high-tech output surpassed 1 trillion yuan (US$123 billion) last year, 950 billion yuan of which was contributed by the electronic information industry, ranking it China's first, according to Huang. The high-tech sector witnessed a year-on-year growth rate of 25 percent during the 10th Five-Year Plan period, whose total value nearly tripled by 2005 compared with 2001.

Huang also revealed that Guangdong will present a series of measures to boost the building of a metropolitan area in the eastern coast of the Pearl River Delta region, including the cities of Shenzhen, Dongguan and Huizhou, with Shenzhen as the key city. 
Huang reiterated the importance of independent innovation, saying Guangdong still has a long way to go, and should look to learn from South Korea in many aspects.

Guangdong has vowed to become an international scientific and technological innovation center by 2020, although it now ranks first in the nation in the number of nationally acknowledged brands.

The province's GDP exceeded 2 trillion yuan last year. It took Guangdong 22 years to gain its first 1 trillion yuan, but only five years to double it. Currently its economy has surpassed that of Singapore and Hong Kong. "The next target is to catch up with and surpass Taiwan and South Korea," the governor said.

(Shenzhen Daily March 9, 2006)