The Greater Bay Area’s response to the need for high-quality basic research is to build it, with four clusters of scientific institutions coming out of the ground in Guangzhou’s Nansha, Shenzhen’s Guangming, Dongguan’s Songshan Lake, and Zhongshan’s Cuiheng.
When it comes to technology, Guangdong has no worries about designing, building, and selling stuff. But there is a step before all of that in the tech industry’s value chain, and it is a step in which the province has traditionally been lagging. Basic scientific research is where Beijing and Shanghai have long had an edge, given the prevalence of their leading universities focused on scientific research.
It’s not as if the province lacks in academic spirit or ambition. There are some well-established innovation hubs in Guangdong, such as Guangzhou’s “Science City”, which has some of the world’s biggest R&D-focused corporate names established in its Huangpu district, or Shenzhen’s Nanshan Science and Technology Park, home to some of the country’s biggest tech brands. And the GBA masterplan has at its core the ambitious “10 hubs” plan to build China’s answer to Silicon Valley, known as the Science and Technology Innovation Corridor (STIC).
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