Binzhou, East China's Shandong province, has been implementing its innovation-driven development strategy to serve its high-quality development.

Innovation has been driving up the city's economic growth in various ways, officials said. The city's gross domestic product increased by 95.5 percent, with an average annual growth rate of 6.9 percent over the past decade.

In 2021, the proportion of the city's research and development investment in GDP ranked first in Shandong province. The added value of high-tech and digital manufacturing industries increased by 54.4 percent and 101.6 percent, respectively, during the first three quarters of 2022.

As a traditional industrial city, Binzhou emphasizes upgrading traditional growth drivers with new ones and developing modern industries.

In the aluminum industry, one of the city's pillar sectors, the proportion of middle and high-end aluminum products increased by 30.2 percentage points in three years and reached 65.2 percent in 2021.

Shandong Weiqiao Pioneering Group Co, a producer of aluminum in Binzhou, is developing a green way to advance the sector's high-end development. It has created eight types of highly durable aluminum alloy materials, which outperform conventional alloys overall by more than 20 percent. A number of global automakers now receive their high-quality aluminum extrusion products from Weiqiao Pioneer Group.

At Zhongyu, a local food company, deep processing of the whole industry chain added nearly 5,500 yuan ($787.8) per metric ton of wheat, increasing the output value by 147 percent, compared with ordinary processing.

The recent 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasized that education, science and technology, and human resources are the foundational and strategic pillars for building a modern socialist country in all aspects.

Binzhou has developed a market-oriented system for technological innovation in which enterprises are the main players and synergy is created through the joint efforts of enterprises, universities, and research institutes.

Now, the city's 39 enterprises established cooperation with 13 institutions of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which helped a batch of national brand scientific research achievements transform and begin trial productions in such fields as elastic strain sensors, and laser selective imaging.