Finding what's best to lead nation's west

Quality manufacturing

On May 17, 2018, Chongqing Liangjiang Star, China's first carrier rocket designed and built by a private company, was launched successfully in Northwest China.

"If you want to make a rocket, you must build an engine first," said Shu Chang, founder and chief executive of Chongqing OneSpace Technology.

"When I visited my teachers at Beihang University and some Chinese rocket experts, do you know what they told me? They said 'You can never build an engine if you don't have 1 billion yuan ($145 million)'."

Shu decided eventually to work with Chongqing Liangjiang Aviation and the Aerospace Industrial Park to raise the funds.

They each contributed 80 million yuan to set up Chongqing OneSpace Technology Company, enough capital for Shu to follow his dream of building an engine.

In the past two years, the Liangjiang New Area has raised a total of 500 million yuan for the project and helped OneSpace become the first Chinese private company to launch a rocket.

Now, the company has signed launch agreements with many clients at home and abroad, and its launch program is fully booked until next year.

The Liangjiang New Area has taken the lead in industrial transformation and upgrades in order to help Chinese companies compete against the rest of the world. It explores innovative finance models to promote the rapid growth of emerging industries, such as robotics, biomedicine, information technology and new energy.

It has attracted 60 billion yuan in market capital to those fields by setting up a 2 billion yuan equity investment fund for strategic emerging industries. Leading companies, such as BOE Technology Group and Japan's robot manufacturing company Kawasaki, have benefited greatly from those strategies.

To date, 149 Fortune 500 companies have settled in Liangjiang.

Last year, Chongqing hosted China's first Smart Expo which attracted 316 projects with a total of 567 billion yuan investment. The expo will be held in Chongqing every year.

"Smart Expo will provide a driving force for Chongqing's industrial transformation and high-quality development," said Wu Cunrong, deputy mayor of Chongqing.

"By 2022, the sales income of our smart industry will try to reach 1 trillion yuan," he added.