From tourism to big data, Chinese province presents itself in Silicon Valley

Photo taken on Sept 27, 2016 shows the scene of an event to promote tourism in China's Guizhou province, held in San Francisco, the United States. From tourism to big data, Guizhou Province in southwestern China has presented itself as a tourism destination as well as an information technology pilot for the world to see.[Photo/Xinhua]

From tourism to big data, Guizhou province in Southwestern China has presented itself as a tourism destination as well as an information technology pilot for the world to see.

Mr Chen Gang, deputy director of a task force directing the national big data pilot project in Guizhou, a mountainous province known for its scenic landscape and ethnic diversity, has spent almost a week on the U.S. west coast to talk about what is going on with his province.

On Monday, Chen led a provincial delegation to Santa Clara, at center of Silicon Valley in northern California, to promote a big data pilot zone in Guizhou, the only one receiving designation and funding from China's central government to build big data infrastructure, experiment on internet of things (IoT) and cloud computation, and other applications.

On Tuesday, he was in downtown San Francisco, north of Silicon Valley, to showcase Guizhou's tourism resources.

With a doctoral degree in chemistry and a top leadership position within government institutions at Guiyang, the provincial capital, Chen did not see tourism and big data as two industries far from each other.

At the Santa Clara event, he cited city management as an area where big data has a role. For instance, data mining helps Guiyang municipal authorities to see where passengers, both local residents and tourists from outside the city, need short rides to go from one place to another. The city, already overloaded with private cars, therefore is able to improve taxi services and car-sharing practices while cracking down on unlicensed cabs.

He told more than 150 people at the event, including some from businesses in Silicon Valley, that multinational American companies such as Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Qualcomm, Dell, International Business Machine (IBM) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have joined Baidu, Alibaba, Huawei, ZTE, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom and other leading Chinese information technology companies to operate research and development (R&D) centers or projects in Guizhou.

Baidu, an internet company headquartered in Beijing, the Chinese capital, has explored the possibility of road testing its self-driving vehicles in the province, once hard to reach with any transportation means for centuries but now proud to have a web of highways and local roadways through mountainous terrains reaching every county and city seats and rural villages.