Wu Guangqiang

    jw368@163.com

    ON May 25, the China Big Data Industry Summit and China E-commerce Innovation and Development Summit kicked off in Guiyang, capital of Southwest China’s Guizhou Province, attracting 20,000 industrial leaders and experts in the big data industry. Premier Li Keqiang delivered a keynote speech at the opening ceremony.

    Many may wonder what lures so many topnotch industrial leaders to this relatively underdeveloped province in the hinterlands of southwestern China. Cut off by high mountains, Guizhou has been associated with inaccessibility, backwardness and poverty.

    Yet the province has discovered an Aladdin’s lamp to transform and enrich itself: the big data industry.

    My curiosity about what can turn an a region like Guizhou into a big data hub prompted me to find out more about the matter. My new discoveries provide me with insight into the question intriguing many: how to achieve common prosperity in China amid great disparities in development between regions.

    Let’s see how Guizhou is making the impossible possible.

    In February 2014, the Guizhou Provincial Government announced an ambitious blueprint to foster and promote the big data industry. Immediate measures were taken to speed up infrastructure construction, big data companies were introduced to the area, a financing system was established and recruitment of talent began. All of this aims at turning Guizhou into a leader in the country in big data gathering and application.

    To take the lead in application of big data, the Guizhou government opened to the public all the data involving governmental affairs. In July 2014, the construction of the system platform “Guizhou on the Cloud” kicked off, marking the start of the building of a cloud network covering all aspects of social life, including government, industry, e-commerce, transport, tourism, food safety and environmental protection.

    Seven government department units acted as pilots by launching the Project 7 N Cloud, characterized by sharing and applying data with each other, which made the Guizhou government the first provincial government to boast a cloud services platform integrating management, sharing and exchange of the data between government, enterprises and social units.

    As of the end of 2014, the network has incorporated 41 subsystems of cloud application, with hundreds of terabytes of data stored centrally in Guizhou on the cloud platform.

    The government example of actively exploiting big data greatly encouraged enterprises. Since 2014, Guizhou has signed over 160 contracts with enterprises from home and abroad, siphoning a total investment of more than 170 billion yuan (US$25.9 billion).

    Many IT giants are involved in the quiet technical revolution in the southwest, including Alibaba, Chinasoft International, Inspur, Huawei and Microsoft, who will help with the construction of the infrastructure.

    Leading telecommunication carriers like China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile have started building cloud-computing bases and big data centers in the province’s Gui’an New District.

    The big data wave is reshaping the province rapidly. Guiyang has seen the total output value of its data information industry amount to 66.3 billion yuan last year, and by 2017, the province’s big data-related industries will generate an output value of 300 billion yuan, making Guizhou the national leader in big data gathering and application.

    Common residents can feel the changes. Intelligent Traffic Cloud enables them to find out realtime traffic information; online hospitals allow them to make appointments with doctors, and even consult one from home; online tutoring systems make it possible for a few experienced teachers to impart knowledge to students from remote mountain villages who would otherwise have no chance of attending such classes.

    Since Last May, the citizens of Guiyang have been able to enjoy free Wi-Fi, which covers all the main areas of the city.

    Guizhou’s experience shows China’s institutional advantage in the nation’s economic and social development. The Central Government, through policy guidance, can make the best of every available resource to achieve balanced development across the country.

    Taking into consideration of actual situations in different regions, China’s leadership is moving toward realizing the goal of common prosperity in the nation.

    (The author is an English tutor and freelance writer.)