Hangzhou has developed into one of the digital economy hubs in China thanks in part to the growth of local IT giants such as Alibaba and NetEase.Photos Provided To China Daily

Blueprint in place to accelerate digitalized trade and cross-border e-commerce and extend the application of smart technologies to manufacturing, Yuan Shenggao reports.

Hangzhou, one of China's most famous tourism destinations, has unveiled its ambitious plan to be the nation's foremost city for the digital economy.

"We plan to fulfill the mission through three major paths - industrialization of digital resources, digitalization of industries, urban digitalization - and their integration," said Zhou Jiangyong, Party chief of Hangzhou.

In recent years, the capital of eastern Zhejiang province - home to Chinese IT mogul Jack Ma and his e-commerce empire Alibaba - has dramatically grown from a tourism-oriented city to an emerging city with strong digital economy.

In Hangzhou, more than 95 percent of the convenience stores, 98 percent of the taxis, all the buses and subways are supporting mobile payment.

"The industrialization of digital resources means they could be turned into a business with great opportunities, or the so-called Blue Ocean market," Zhou said.

Currently, the city is leading in such cutting-edge sectors as e-commerce, cloud computing and big data, artificial intelligence and the internet of things - while it needs to make bigger progress in the integrated circuits, network communications, flexible electronics and data security industries, he noted.

More importantly, the city should accelerate its exploration of the fields of blockchain, quantum technology, virtual reality and satellite and commercial aerospace, which represent a development trend, he added.

While tapping the potential in digital resources, traditional industries in Hangzhou has increasingly turned digitalized to enhance their competitiveness at home and abroad.

In Bainiu, one of the city's most poverty-stricken villages in Hangzhou's Lin'an district, the locals started selling the area's special pecan nuts online a couple of years ago. As a result, sales of the pecan nuts rose markedly from 1 million yuan ($145,315) in 2007 to 350 million yuan in 2017.

The per capita income of the villagers reached nearly 30,000 yuan last year, surpassing the average level of the residents in Lin'an, officials said.

According to Zhou, the digitalization of industries will focus on the development of robots, the renovation of the factories with IoT and the utilization of cloud technology.