Qiu Rui: The Expansion of International Science and Technology Innovation Centers Is of Strategic Significance
Changes in the world unseen in a century are accelerating; the international balance of power is undergoing profound adjustment, and the external environment is fraught with instability and uncertainty. The field of science and technology has increasingly become the focus of great power competition, and technological innovation has become a key variable concerning national development, security, and long-term competitiveness. The 2025 Central Economic Work Conference proposed to "construct international center for science and technology innovation in Beijing (Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei), Shanghai (Yangtze River Delta), and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA)." Expanding the Beijing international center for science and technology innovation to encompass Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, and the Shanghai center to the Yangtze River Delta, aims to accelerate the formation of major sources for China’s original innovation [1]. Together, they will create a strategic guide for building a global power in science and technology and establish a benchmark for supporting and leading Chinese-path modernization through technology. This major initiative will further promote the construction of international centers for science and technology innovation with global influence, effectively and powerfully facilitating industrial upgrades led by technological innovation, and continuously giving rise to new quality productive forces.
Remarkable Achievements in Constructing Science and Innovation Centers
An international center for science and technology innovation (STI) is a city or region that occupies a leading and dominant position in global STI activities and plays a significant value-added role in global value networks. It functions in scientific research, technological innovation, industrial driving, and cultural leadership, characterized by a high density of STI resources, active innovation activities, powerful innovation capabilities, and extensive influence. Actively planning the construction of international STI centers and leveraging their leading role in regional innovation development has become a strategic move for major countries worldwide to respond to the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation and to enhance comprehensive national competitiveness.
Since the 18th National Congress of the CPC, the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has deployed the construction of three major international STI centers in Beijing, Shanghai, and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao GBA, achieving clear results. Since their launch, these three centers have vigorously strengthened original innovation, produced a batch of original achievements, and gathered several advanced manufacturing clusters, with their radiating and leading roles continuing to manifest. In the 2025 Global Innovation Index ranking of the top 100 clusters released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the number of China's clusters in the global top 100 has ranked first for three consecutive years, with the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster jumping to the top spot globally.
In the process of constructing these international STI centers, the three regions share many commonalities while each exhibiting its own advantages. Beijing gathers high-quality scientific and educational resources, possessing outstanding capabilities in basic research and original innovation; it has seen significant results in building a major world scientific center and innovation highland and promoting the output of major original achievements. Shanghai adheres to the "dual-wheel drive" of technological innovation and institutional mechanism innovation, striving to create an open innovation ecosystem with global competitiveness, aiming to become an important source of technological innovation, a strategic highland for independent innovation, and an important hub in global innovation networks. The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao GBA leverages its advantages at the forefront of reform and opening up, accelerating the formation of an economic system supported by innovation as the primary driver, focusing on enhancing the capacity for transforming scientific and technological achievements, and building a global STI highland and a source of emerging industries. The construction of these three major centers in Beijing, Shanghai, and the GBA has formed a trend of distinctive features and collaborative progress in terms of function and positioning.
Expansion and Quality Enhancement are Imperative
Currently, technological innovation has entered a stage of high complexity and systematization. Whether it is breakthroughs in original innovation, tackling key core technologies, or the large-scale application of scientific achievements, the collaborative force of multiple types of elements is required. Under the new situation, the model of promoting STI centers based on a single city, while having played an important role in aggregating high-end innovation resources, has gradually revealed problems such as insufficient spatial carrying capacity, restricted industrial transformation, and incomplete innovation chains. Looking at globally influential STI centers, they basically operate in the form of city clusters or metropolitan areas. International technological competition is shifting from single-point competition to systemic competition. The expansion of these centers is a major strategic decision made by grasping the general trend of the new technological revolution and industrial transformation, aiming to enhance the global influence and competitiveness of China's international STI centers.
The expansion of international STI centers lies not only in scale but also in the simultaneous improvement of the energy level of the innovation system, global linking capabilities, and the ability to shape rules, reflecting a significant change in the logic of construction. First, the focus is shifting from promoting the concentration of elements to driving systemic coordination, placing more emphasis on the systematic integration, functional division, and collaborative operation of innovation resources within the region to improve overall innovation efficiency. Second, the focus is shifting from improving scientific research capabilities to enhancing comprehensive innovation capabilities, placing more value on the comprehensive performance of the three centers in original innovation, achievement transformation, industrial driving, and global influence. Third, the focus is shifting from city-to-city competition to highlighting national strategy; by coordinating STI layouts at the city cluster level, regional differentiated development can be effectively guided, enhancing the overall security and efficiency of the national innovation system.
Accordingly, three important orientations should be clarified in the construction process. First, treat city clusters as the basic unit to enhance comprehensive competitiveness, coordinating innovation resources over a larger spatial range and building an innovation network with multi-node synergy and complementary functions. Second, enhance international discourse power through original innovation capabilities and the power to source disruptive technologies, striving to continuously output original innovation results and key technologies of global significance. Third, enhance global linking capabilities by steadily expanding institutional opening up, deeply embedding the domestic innovation system into the global STI network, enhancing influence through cooperation, and gaining the initiative in competition.
Taking Pragmatic Measures to Meet Challenges
The expanded international STI centers bear an important mission: they must both create source advantages in key core technologies and enhance leadership in international technological cooperation and rule-making. Currently, the construction of these three centers still faces some challenges.
For Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the intermediate links from basic research to industrialization remain weak; the transformation of original innovation advantages into industrial competitive advantages is insufficient. The institutional costs of collaborative innovation in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei remain high, and a highly integrated innovation community has not yet been formed. For the Yangtze River Delta, there are still shortcomings in breakthroughs in basic theory and the sourcing of disruptive technologies; the ability to lead the global technological frontier needs to be strengthened, the internal regional division of innovation labor is not yet clear enough, and there is room for improvement in the division of coordination and resource integration in key links of the innovation chain. For the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao GBA, basic research and original innovation capabilities are relatively weak, the longevity and stability of R&D investment are lacking, and the sustainability of high-end original innovation output needs enhancement. The special conditions of "one country, two systems, three customs territories, and three currencies" result in institutional differences in legal systems, research funding, tax policies, and talent management, which objectively affect the overall innovation efficiency and depth of collaboration in the region.
In the next stage, the construction of the three centers should be advanced in a coordinated manner, with differentiated positioning clarified. By establishing cross-regional strategic synergy mechanisms, a collective force can be formed in major technological tasks, international cooperation platforms, and global technological governance, driving China's international STI centers from "single-point breakthroughs" to "systemic leadership."
Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei needs to enhance its global influence as a source of innovation by strengthening original innovation. Relying on Beijing's dense national strategic technological forces, it should coordinate the layout of national laboratories and major scientific and technological infrastructures across the region to form a "multi-point supported, network-coordinated" basic research system, continuously outputting original innovation results with international influence in frontier fields such as quantum information, artificial intelligence, and life sciences. It should use expansion to bridge the "middle gap" [2] in achievement transformation, placing more functions such as pilot-scale testing and engineering verification in Tianjin and Hebei to build a complete chain from original innovation to industrialization. It should also improve the internationalization level of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei collaborative innovation system, carrying out deeper institutional innovation in the cross-regional use of research funds, the flow of researchers, and the distribution of income from intellectual property rights, aligning with international common rules to reduce the institutional costs of international research cooperation and multinational R&D activities.
The Yangtze River Delta needs to create international industrial innovation leadership through system integration capabilities. While consolidating advantageous industries such as integrated circuits and biomedicine, it should increase long-term investment in basic research and frontier exploration, promoting the deep integration of original innovation results with a powerful manufacturing system to form globally leading technological paths and industrial standards. It should optimize the regional division of labor and synergy mechanisms through expansion, coordinating the innovation layout of the three provinces and one municipality (Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui), clarifying the functional positioning of different cities in the innovation chain to avoid homogeneous competition, and promoting an efficient collaborative model of "R&D in Shanghai, engineering in the periphery, and large-scale manufacturing in the hinterland." It should enhance its hub status in global innovation networks, relying on Shanghai's international financial and shipping centers to develop technology finance and services, enhancing its ability to allocate global capital, technology, and talent.
The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao GBA needs to amplify its advantages in open innovation by strengthening international connectivity. It should promote institutional innovation by fostering the alignment of rules and mechanisms between Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao in fields such as research funding, tax incentives, intellectual property protection, and talent management, exploring the establishment of institutional experimental zones for cross-border research cooperation and achievement transformation. It should remedy the shortcomings in basic research, enhance the supply capacity of original innovation, arrange high-level basic research platforms and joint research institutions, and guide more long-term original innovation projects to settle there. Finally, it should fully leverage Hong Kong's function as an international STI hub, utilizing Hong Kong's advantages in international research cooperation, technology finance, and legal services to promote the internationalized transformation of mainland innovation achievements through Hong Kong, enhancing the GBA's visibility and influence in the global STI system.
Through the collaborative layout and division of labor among the three major international STI centers, China is expected to form a strategic pattern of multi-polar support and gradient connection in the global innovation landscape.