By LI Linxu

As one of China's major national strategies, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region's coordinated development is now pressing ahead at full steam and has grown into a new driver of the country's development.

In 2014, China mapped out a key strategy to build Beijing and its neighboring regions into a world-class regional city cluster. The move entails adjusting the economic structure and rationalizing space utilization, while exploring a new mode of optimized integrated development in a region with a dense population.

Nine years on, the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region has advanced to a new level.

Latest statistics show that in 2022, the economic aggregate of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region exceeded 10 trillion RMB, 1.8 times that of 2013 on the basis of current prices.

Of particular note is that sci-tech innovation and industrial synergy are one of the highlights in the implementation of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region's coordinated development.

In 2021, the region's R&D expenditure reached 394.9 billion RMB, 2.1 times that of 2013, accounting for 14.1 percent of the country's total.

Driven by greater intensity of R&D investment, the region witnessed an increasingly large number of innovative enterprises.

A driverless car parking before the Collaborative Development Center at Beijing-Tianjin Zhongguancun Tech Town in Baodi district of Tianjin, north China.(PHOTO: XINHUA)

In the 4th batch of "little giant" enterprises released last year, referring to SMEs that specialize in niche sectors, command a high market share and have strong innovative capacity and core technologies, there are 535 such enterprises in the region, accounting for 12.3 percent of the total on the list.

Tianjin Progoo Information Technology Co., Ltd. is one of the beneficiaries of this strategy. From Beijing's Zhongguancun to Tianjin's Binhai-Zhongguancun, the company has gone through a transformation from an R&D-oriented company to a market-oriented company.

The mode of conducting R&D in Beijing and making sci-tech achievement transformation in Tianjin is a good fit for the company's development, said Zhang Lifu, chairman of the company's board of directors.

By leveraging Beijing's R&D advantages, and its neighboring region's manufacturing advantages, the same story is also unfolding in many other companies.

In 2022, Tianjin attracted 198.9 billion RMB of investment from Beijing and Hebei, while a total of 4,395 units from Beijing and Tianjin moved to Hebei, according to a report recently released by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics.

Accelerating the coordinated commercialization of sci-tech achievements in the region is an important work in giving full play to Beijing's advantages in sci-tech innovation, and promoting the deep integration of the region's innovation chains and industrial chains, said Li Guoping, director of the Beijing Development Institute of Peking University.