In recent years, Qidong, a county-level city in Nantong, East China's Jiangsu province has been unswervingly accelerating its industrial transformation and upgrading. Currently, innovation has served as the main driver of local high-quality development.

Qidong boasts a solid foundation in heavy equipment-making. It has made the biggest cutter suction dredger in Asia, the biggest piling boat in the world and now it is building N1048HU, a floating oil production platform, marking a big stride towards high-end oil and gas platform construction.

A bird's-eye view of a port in Qidong where heavy equipment is made. [Photo: WeChat account: qidongfabu]

In 2021, the city's three leading industries, including the port, as well as characteristic and strategic emerging industries, achieved sales of 107.77 billion yuan ($14.73 billion), an increase of 41.1 percent year-on-year. The output value of high-tech industries reached 64.34 billion yuan, accounting for 57.4 percent of the output value of large-scale industries, an increase of 18 percentage points over that of 2012. 

Furthermore, Qidong has launched a series of action plans, including the "1521" industrial leading enterprise cultivation plan and a three-year action plan for "intelligent and digital transformation". Fruitful results have been yielded. By the end of 2021, 20 enterprise technology centers above the provincial level and one at the national level had been built.

To nurture innovation, Qidong has implemented a series of policies to attract talents, including 26 new talent policies. In 2021, it introduced more than 350 high-level innovation and entrepreneurship talents, doubling the figure of 2012. Over the past 10 years, 85 provincial “entrepreneurship and innovation talents” and five provincial "entrepreneurship and innovation teams" have been selected in Qidong.