BEIJING, Sept. 1 (Xinhua) -- At NIO's highly automated factory in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province, newly assembled vehicles undergo inspection by two artificial intelligence (AI)-powered systems. One system completes 69 checks in just 84 seconds, which includes charging functions, interior options and vehicle heating. The other uses the vehicle's onboard computer to run self-diagnostic checks on nearly 1,000 functions in about three minutes.
"By continuously training and refining our models with data generated from daily production, we have made the factory more efficient and intelligent, and AI can now assist with 80 percent of production decisions at the factory," said Yang Yi, public affairs director of NIO Manufacturing.
The factory offers a glimpse of how sci-tech advances are entering production lines across China, a trend being accelerated by closer links among research institutions, companies and regions.
At the heart of this push are China's three international sci-tech innovation centers: Beijing (Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei), Shanghai (Yangtze River Delta), and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
The expansion of the Beijing and Shanghai centers into the wider Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and the Yangtze River Delta, respectively, marks a shift from single-city breakthroughs toward coordinated regional development, a direction set out at the 2025 Central Economic Work Conference.
In the latest episode of China Economic Roundtable, an all-media talk show hosted by Xinhua News Agency, guests discussed the development of the three centers, ways to strengthen original innovation and how closer regional coordination can support industrial upgrading.
LINKING RESEARCH WITH INDUSTRIAL CAPACITY
By extending beyond individual cities, the three centers are bringing concentrated research resources closer to the industrial capacity and market demand of the wider regions.
As the region's core engine, Beijing has built more than 200 service platforms covering the full process of turning research findings into commercial applications, including proof-of-concept platforms, while a technology trading center in Zhongguancun holds weekly roadshows for research findings from key national and municipal laboratories, said Yi Tong, a researcher with the Beijing Academy of Science and Technology.
The Greater Bay Area has developed a cross-border model in which research conducted in Hong Kong and Macao is commercialized on the mainland, with five research universities from Hong Kong setting up technology transfer platforms in Qianhai and incubating more than 150 sci-tech projects, said Zhang Zhengang, a professor at South China University of Technology.
Beyond cross-border research collaboration, the region's industrial base and market demand are also accelerating commercialization, as seen at Guangzhou-based chipmaker CanSemi Technology Inc., which built a factory from scratch and began production in just 18 months, focusing on analog chips used in electronics and home appliances, said company assistant president Wu Hao.
The Greater Bay Area is now home to 10 major national sci-tech infrastructure facilities and 10 industrial clusters each worth over 1 trillion yuan (about 147.43 billion U.S. dollars).
Shanghai, meanwhile, is helping companies refine technologies by building a public platform for AI-driven scientific research and providing access to industrial application scenarios, said Zha Hao, chairman and CEO of Shanghai Smartlogic Technology Ltd., whose scientific computing and simulation platform can reduce the time needed for some drug and new-material simulations from years to days.
REMOVING BOTTLENECKS ACROSS INNOVATION CHAIN
The three centers have each developed unique strengths. Beijing ranks among the world's top cities for the number of highly cited researchers. Shanghai stands out for leading original research in physics, chemistry, and life sciences. The Greater Bay Area excels at facilitating cross-border flows of research resources and ranks among China's top regions for both the number of high-tech enterprises and patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty.
Building on those strengths, experts said the centers now need to address bottlenecks across the innovation chain by producing more original breakthroughs, improving the path from laboratory research to mass production, and enabling innovation resources to flow more efficiently across regions.
Chen Baoming, head of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, under the Ministry of Science and Technology, called on the three regions to conduct joint research, share sci-tech resources and promote mutual recognition of innovation policies. Chen also noted that commercialization should be planned from the outset instead of being considered only after research results have been produced.
Operating outside conventional systems of administrative rank, professional titles and government staffing quotas, the National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing, serves as a testing ground for research management reform in the country's capital and has produced a number of original breakthroughs.
In the Greater Bay Area, Guangdong has allocated more than one-third of its provincial strategic funding for sci-tech innovation to basic research under a 10-year plan and has launched major projects aimed at original breakthroughs in fields ranging from quantum technology and biomanufacturing to embodied intelligence and sixth-generation mobile communications, Zhang said.
Shanghai, meanwhile, is developing a support system linking laboratory research, pilot testing and mass production, using high-throughput experiments and engineering simulation to lower pilot-testing costs while standardizing data collection across all three stages to support AI-assisted research, Zha said.
Looking ahead, the guests said the three centers should build on growing momentum in original innovation, research-industry integration and regional coordination to turn scientific advances into tangible development gains. Enditem
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