Tiangong Ultra, developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, won the world's first half-marathon for humanoid robots in Beijing on April 19, demonstrating the prospects of China's humanoid robot industry and the epitome of the country's strategic emerging industries and future industries. These industries are surging ahead, facilitating the construction of a resilient economy with sci-tech force.

Strong computing power

Computing power is a crucial element for the speedy development of emerging industries, especially those closely related to information technology and the digital economy.

In 2022, China initiated the "East Data, West Computing" project to establish eight national computing hubs and 10 national data center clusters. One of the hubs is in Guizhou province in southwest China.

The Chinese blockbuster Nezha 2 used over 1,900 special effect shots and 40 percent of the computing power to create these complex scenes came from the Gui'an Supercomputing Center in Guizhou.

Guizhou's computing power totaled 57 EFLOPS by the end of 2024, making up 23 percent of the national total.

According to Jiang Yang, deputy director of the Big Data Development Administration of Guizhou, data latency has been reduced to only three milliseconds within Guizhou, 10 milliseconds for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and 20 milliseconds for the Yangtze River Delta Region and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region.

Jiang said Guizhou has also opened the world's first 400G computing power channel, which can meet the low latency requirements for AI training and making special effect movie scenes.

Another hub is located more than 1,000 km away from Guizhou in Ningxia Hui autonomous region in northwest China. Zhongwei, a city in Ningxia, is one of the computing clusters.

By 2024, it boasted 13 data center enterprises, established eight data center industrial parks, and the country's first intelligent computing base with over 10,000 accelerator cards.

Stable industrial chain

Lithium batteries are critical to many products in our daily life, such as digital devices, electric vehicles and energy storage devices.

Dubbed Asia's "lithium capital," Yichun city in Jiangxi province, east China, has both upstream and downstream enterprises in the lithium industry, creating a complete industrial chain of lithium mines, materials, batteries and recycling with a value of one trillion RMB level.

In Yichun's economic and technological zone, a large lithium battery project is under construction. It will create a lithium battery and battery pack base with an annual output of 30 GW and a value of 16 billion RMB, according to Yan Jingguang, manager of the infrastructure department of Yichun Gotion Battery Company.

In 2024, Yichun ranked first domestically in its output of lithium carbonate. The city has been striving to build a mechanism of leading enterprises driving industrial advancement, related supporting policies following, and developing industry cluster, which effectively guarantees the safety and stability of the national lithium battery and the new energy industrial chain and supply chain, according to Yan Yun, secretary of the CPC Yichun Municipal Committee.

Coordinated regional industry development

The clusters of emerging industries are growing rapidly, creating a three-dimensional mechanism of  independent technological innovation, industrial transformation and cultivation of regional ecology.

New energy and intelligent connected vehicles are one of the six key industrial chains coordinatedly cultivated in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region. In April 2024, the Jingjintang Expressway, the first domestic cross-province expressway connecting Beijing and its neighboring city Tianjin, became the first expressway where cross-province tests for cooperative vehicle-infrastructure autonomous driving are carried out.

In 2025, Sinotrans Limited and Pony.ai developed an autonomous driving truck that by March had driven over 1.5 million km cumulatively at night. This is a key step for intelligent connected vehicles to reach industrialization from the laboratory, said Liu Zhizhou, chief of the equipment industry division of Industry and Information Technology Department of Hebei province.

Liu said cross-province test scenarios not only prove the reliability of cooperative vehicle-infrastructure technologies, but also explore a new approach to integrating expressway passages with business modes. This provides upstream and downstream enterprises with real training ground and accelerates the iteration of technologies and their commercialization.

Other regions are also spurring coordinated industrial development. For example, the G60 Science and Innovation Corridor in the Yangtze River Delta Region is fostering innovation and economic growth by connecting nine cities along the G60 highway.

The nine cities have strategic cooperation with the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, Ltd. (COMAC), jointly tackling key technological barriers and promoting the integration of industries, academia, research and application. This is enhancing the innovation capability of the entire industrial chain of the large aircraft industry, according to Ye Wei, deputy director of the Science and Technology Committee of COMAC.

With a large market scale, comprehensive industrial chains and continuous policy support, China's emerging industries and future industries are advancing with new application scenarios, becoming key engines of economic growth.