Digitalization

The city will also accelerate the digitalized trade and cross-border e-commerce and extend the application of digital technologies and smart equipment to the agricultural industry, he noted.

The digitalization of urban management - what has been referred to as installing a brain for the city - is making Hangzhou smarter.

Currently, a subway system with a total length of 329 kilometers is under construction in the city, which led to a temporary shrinkage in aggregate road surface areas for vehicle transportation of nearly 20 percent.

But government statistics showed that transportation speeds on the roads improved by 15 percent in the first half of this year because of the operations of the "City Brain".

Official figures also indicate that criminal cases in Hangzhou decreased by 8.9 percent year-on-year from January to August this year. Meanwhile, fire accidents plunged a whopping 42.6 percent from a year ago.

"This is making the city smarter and making people's lives better," Zhou said.

The operation of the "City Brain" will be extended from transportation management to urban management, housing, public security and market regulation in 2019 and further cover the Asian Games, tourism, environmental protection and fire prevention by 2022.

That's according to the city's action plan, released in October, which works as a guideline for the city from 2018 to 2022 to meet its ultimate goal of being the nation's No 1 city for the digital economy.

According to the action plan, Hangzhou's digital economy system will be fundamentally shaped by 2022, so that its digital economic output will hit more than 1.2 trillion yuan - a domestically leading level - of which the added value of the sector's core industries will reach roughly 580 billion yuan, accounting for 58 percent of the province's total.

The city also aims to build a couple of industrial clusters in the fields of e-commerce, cloud computing and big data, artificial intelligence, digital content and information security that are expected to have a global impact.