East China's historical city Quanzhou sets to be added to UNESCO's "City of Gastronomy" list, focusing on not only preparing tasty cuisines, but also building a mature supply chain.
As a famous historical and cultural city in China, Quanzhou used to be selected as an UNESCO heritage site. This city is currently endeavoring to establish a new signature of gastronomy.
"These are traditional dishes with a long history, like this beef. Quanzhou has along history of cooking beef. This dish has curry inside, which was an import from southern Asia. This black chicken is a specialty of Quanzhou," introduced by Liu Shuwen, the president of Quanzhou Cuisine Association.
Liu said that becoming a city of gastronomy can promote the sales of local agricultural products and ingredients to the whole country and even the whole world.
When it comes to culinary, the origin of an ingredient can strongly affect its flavor. Some local dishes can only be made with local ingredients to obtain the special flavor, strengthening the uniqueness of food.
"Our ingredients including Dehua Black Chicken, Fujian Wine, Dehua Camellia Oil are all from local places," said Hu Canhui, the chef of Zayton Courtyard.
An hour and a half away from the center of Quanzhou City, Dehua County is situated as a distribution center for local agricultural products. The Dehua Black Chicken is a landmark agricultural product which is raised free-range in the mountains.
As the head of Daiyun Farmers Cooperatives, Zeng Xianzhong started to raise black chickens since 2011. Now around 350,000 chickens are raised every year.
"Our chickens are widely sold in supermarkets and communities. We are now planning to build an industrial park, because we have to make pre-cooked food for cross-provincial and even global trade," Zeng said.
The mature industrial chain and the increasing food consumption market are the bases to support Quanzhou's bid for the "City of Gastronomy".
"Behind the delicious cuisine lies the service industry which is related to people's wellbeing. We want to engage in this industry because food connects everything. The purpose of our bid for City of Gastronomy is not only to enhance the Quanzhou's reputation, but more importantly, to gain benefits for our people," said Lin Wenchao, Deputy Director of Quanzhou's Special "City of Gastronomy" Team.
East China's Quanzhou City aims to become city of gastronomy
Shanghai, a leading force for Chinese modernization, is accelerating the pace of building itself into a science and technology innovation center with global influence.
The tech-savvy metropolis is now speeding up the transition from structure building to function strengthening. Taking strengthening the capability of fostering original sci-tech innovations as the main task, it is pursuing both sci-tech innovation and institutional innovation to significantly improve its comprehensive strength in science and technology as well as the overall effects of innovations.
Over the past 10 years since Shanghai began building itself into an international science and technology innovation center, it has reaped fruitful results in sci-tech innovation, which has pushed the metropolis' GDP across the 4-trillion-yuan (about 570 billion U.S. dollars) mark.
In 2023, Shanghai's total research and development expenditure accounted for 4.4 percent of its GDP, and the city's fiscal expenditure on science and technology rose by 36.7 percent to 52.8 billion yuan (about 7.47 billion U.S. dollars).
Driven by science and technology advances, Shanghai's industrial transformation has sped up. The combined scale of the three leading industries of artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, and biomedicine in the city has reached 1.6 trillion yuan (about 226 billion U.S. dollars).
At the National Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center in Shanghai's Zhangjiang Science City, Qinglong, an open-source general-purpose humanoid robot with a height of 182 centimeters and up to 43 active degrees of freedom, is being trained to pick up oranges.
"After some training, the robot will be able to complete this move by itself when it encounters a similar scenario in the future," said Shi Zhihua, trainer of robot Qinglong.
Thanks to an advanced control software, Qinglong can skillfully perform fast walking, avoid obstacles, go uphill and downhill, and resist impact.
"We plan to build a venue that can simultaneously train 1,000 robots by 2027," Shi said.
The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), a third-generation medium-energy synchrotron light source facility with 46 laboratories, has been operating around the clock to serve researchers from around the country, whose experiments cover a wide range of fields such as life sciences, materials science and chemical catalysis.
"We are using the SSRF's light to observe the phase change process of this material when it's heated to 1,100 degrees Celsius," said Song Shuang, a PhD candidate of Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
"Our team is developing materials for the energy sector," said Miao Zhikai, a researcher of Tianjin University.
"We are developing cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries," said Li Guodong, a researcher of Fudan University.
Though the laboratories at the SSRF have been running at full capacity, researchers still have to apply for them months in advance, reflecting the vibrancy of innovation in Shanghai.
Shanghai blazes sci-tech frontiers to boost innovation-driven modernization
