Upgrade manufacturing sector to become an industrial leader

The top authorities have proposed that China accelerate the development of advanced manufacturing and foster world-class advanced manufacturing clusters. The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) has made relevant policies that should guide local governments to actively upgrade the country's manufacturing sector.

A new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation is already taking place, leading to a high-end, intelligent, green and integrated development of the manufacturing industry. China should increase the proportion of advanced manufacturing to improve the overall quality of its manufacturing sector.

Traditional industry is not a "sunset" industry that cannot be upgraded. In fact, the upgrading of the traditional manufacturing sector could transform it into a business model with advanced manufacturing characteristics. On the other hand, the country should rely on its major regional strategies and advanced manufacturing clusters to speed up the layout of high-end, green industries.

Given that digital transformation can improve efficiency and remold the manufacturing process, China should treat intelligent manufacturing as an important starting point, accelerate the evolution of manufacturing technology, process and model by improving production efficiency, actively cultivate a group of intelligent manufacturing system solution suppliers, and develop a group of mature solutions that integrate emerging technologies. It should encourage enterprises to carry out technological transformation with digitization, networking and intelligent transformation as the main target.

China should also improve the strategic value of data elements and dig out data value to enable the development of manufacturing, and create new and advanced development and production models.

The country should further remove bottlenecks in some core technologies, basic software and key components, and vigorously upgrade the modernization of its industrial and supply chains. It should speed up extensive and in-depth embedding of the new generation of information technology in advanced manufacturing, and accelerate the establishment of a market-oriented industrial technological innovation system that pursues the deep integration of enterprises and universities and promotes the application of technologies.

The country also needs to accelerate the development of an advanced manufacturing ecosystem and foster new forms and models of advanced manufacturing. In the next step, it should anchor the development of advanced manufacturing, improve the policy system, cultivate high-quality enterprises, build the industrial ecology and solve the practical dilemma of "there are no industrial leaders or industrial ecology" in the manufacturing sector.