Traditional industrial center boosts its intelligent manufacturing

Tianjin, the traditional industrial center of North China, has revved up its efforts to push its intelligent manufacturing industry to new heights.

A package of preferential policies announced in mid-June has given a major boost to local enterprises' smart upgrading, cutting-edge internet transformation and the development of robotics, integrated circuits, software, information services and big data sectors.

Each relevant project could gain government support of up to 50 million yuan ($7.3 million).

The move came just one month after the city announced a hefty investment in the local artificial intelligence technologies sector with a fund of up to 100 billion yuan.

The capital was already a significant surge from a newly established 30 billion yuan smart manufacturing fund established in June 2017.

The slew of moves was launched simultaneously with a campaign to hire new personnel, called Haihe Talent. The campaign, which began in May, offered hukou, or permanent residential certificates and subsidies to successful applicants, and was so popular that its application app crashed, with 300,000 visits during the first 20 hours.

The plan was created to meet the hiring needs of developing strategic emerging industries, and proposed a series of measures for innovation in attracting professionals to those key industries, in particular the intelligent manufacturing sectors.

Statistics indicated that by the end of July, 50,000 leading professionals had acquired a hukou in Tianjin, via the city's Haihe Talent project.

Yang Maorong, director of Binhai New Area in Tianjin, now home to Tianhe - one of the world's fastest supercomputers - AI giant iFlytech and what is soon to be the world's largest spacecraft assembly and test center - note that "to aid the growth of the booming intelligent manufacturing sector, academicians and Nobel laurel winners who prefer to move there could be entitled to up to 12 million yuan in subsidy. Among it, their living subsidy could hit 6-7 million yuan."

Lu Zeping, a holder of doctorate in science in surgery and stem cell regeneration medicine jointly cultivated by Lanzhou University and Edinburgh University, said: "The launch of Haihe Talent project solved my worries about working and living in Tianjin."

With simple steps and convenient handling, he got the hukou approval within one day. He said he is more than confident regarding his future in Tianjin.

Moreover, some favorable policies on foreign staff working in Tianjin have been rolled out.

Beginning this year, foreigners who are employed by legal companies and who already have work permits or permanent residence cards in China enjoy the same housing accumulation fund policy treatment with local residents.

Qualified foreign personnel can pay into the housing provident fund in accordance with the relevant provisions of the municipality after an agreement with their employers.