Hanzheng Street, one of the main wholesale centers in Wuhan, capital city of central China's Hubei Province, is undergoing upgrading to introduce a new management system. The whole block will have intelligent street lights integrating the functions of monitoring cameras, traffic counters and automatic parking guidance.

"The advanced system will help us realize information technology (IT)-based management of the flows of people, traffic and commodities as well as stores," Huang Gang, manager of the renovation project, said.

When delivering a government work report at the Second Session of the 13th National People's Congress, China's top legislature, in early March, Premier Li Keqiang said the new urbanization should be people-centered in every respect. "We need to be better at conducting flexible governance and providing thoughtfully designed services to make our cities more livable and give them a more inclusive and welcoming feel," Li stressed.

Building smart cities is an important part of synchronizing IT application and urbanization across the world.

Projects on the anvil

By the end of August 2018, around 500 cities in China had launched smart city projects, according to figures from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

In 2013, a list of pilot smart city projects was announced. In August 2014, eight ministerial agencies including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the NDRC jointly issued a guideline on promoting the development of smart cities, proposing to build a number of them with distinctive features by 2020. This year, Shanghai, Tianjin and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, which consists of nine cities in Guangdong Province on the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Macao, have affirmed accelerating construction of their smart cities.

The market size of smart cities in China was 760 billion yuan ($113.26 billion) in 2014 and 1 trillion yuan ($149.03 billion) in 2016. But it surged to 6 trillion yuan ($894.18 billion) in 2017 and to 7.9 trillion yuan ($1.18 trillion) in 2018, according to a report by Forward Business and Intelligence Co. Ltd. in Shenzhen, Guangdong.

The report estimates that the figure will surpass 10 trillion yuan ($1.49 trillion) in 2019. With a compound annual growth rate of 33.38 percent between 2018 and 2022, it will reach 25 trillion yuan ($3.73 trillion) by 2022.

Boon for industries

Several industries are benefiting from the construction of smart cities, in particular producers of hardware, which have seen rapid growth.

Intelligent street lights are an essential part of smart cities, integrating the functions of monitoring cameras, wireless routers, a push-to-call button for police, and screen and audio equipment for data collection and transmission.

Zhou Ti, co-founder of a Shenzhen-based producer of intelligent street lamps, told China Central Television that his company has orders from cities such as Zunyi in Guizhou Province in the southwest and Wuhan. In 2018, the company's sales revenue doubled from 2017, and Zhou expects it will be double or even triple that this year.

Cameras equipped with facial recognition technology are also widely used in smart cities. Shenzhen Intellifusion Technologies Co., a camera maker established in 2014, focuses on visual recognition. Wang Jun, chief marketing officer of Intellifusion, said every year since then the company has doubled its sales revenue and is selling its products to more than 80 cities across the world. "Construction of smart cities has really offered a huge market to my company," he said.

The trend has also stimulated a great demand for big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, attracting a lot of top tech companies to compete for market shares. According to a report by the Economic Information Daily, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba, China's three largest Internet companies, already have a number of demonstration projects in the field of intelligent transportation, while JD.com, China's second largest e-commerce platform, is focusing on intelligent solutions to social credit.

Baidu's focus is on self-driving vehicles and its demonstration projects have hit the road in dozens of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Robin Li, CEO and co-founder of Baidu, said the first self-driving taxi fleet in China, developed by Baidu, will run in Changsha in central China's Hunan Province. The company is developing a commercial self-driving service, which will contribute to intelligent traffic networks.

Tencent is concentrating on passenger ride codes for fast passes and easy payment on public transport. Tencent ride codes have been applied in more than 100 cities across the country, with the number of users toping 50 million.

Alibaba's ET City Brain system, aiming at optimizing public resources with big data, is mainly used in intelligent traffic management in some cities in east China, such as Hangzhou and Quzhou in Zhejiang Province, Suzhou in Jiangsu Province and Shanghai.

JD.com's intelligent solution for social credit uses big data to draw up social credit scores for individuals, enterprises and potential investors that can be referenced by local governments. The service will spread to 20 cities this year, Zheng Yu, Vice President of JD.com and Managing Director of the company's Intelligent City Research Institute, said at a conference in Beijing on March 21.

Data as key

However, despite the benefits, challenges too exist in the construction of smart cities, such as data integration and data safety.

Construction of smart cities must break data bottlenecks, build a sound data service system and enable on-demand sharing of important data among different government departments, said a report by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The report said on-demand data sharing should make it clear whether specific data should be shared, whether they have been shared and whether the data is appropriately used. A primary database should also be established to address the problem of data fragmentation.

Zheng said how to balance data integration and data safety is a major challenge in the construction of smart cities. According to him, JD.com has developed a technology to prevent data leaks and protect users' privacy.

The shortage of well-trained researchers is another major concern. "We need a large number of versatile professionals, who must be well-versed in both big data and AI as well as traditional industries, especially transportation, environmental protection, energy and e-government," Zheng said. "Only by integrating such knowledge with big data and AI can we develop innovative solutions. However, it is very difficult for universities to cultivate graduates meeting such requirements entirely on their own."

To address the problem, his suggestion is to establish a system integrating enterprises, universities and research institutes while versatile professionals are nurtured through real projects.

Copyedited by Sudeshna Sarkar

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