The government of Guangzhou will soon announce a new series of policies to accelerate the city's high-tech industrial development.

The policies will lay out concrete measures to upgrade the city's capacity for independent scientific and technological innovations.

These include increasing capital inputs for scientific and technological research and development (R&D), offering greater financial support and going further to protect intellectual property rights.

Zhang Guangning, the mayor of Guangzhou, said the city's capital input for the R&D was expected to surpass 2 percent of the city's GDP by the year 2010, or about 19 billion yuan ($2.44 billion).

Guangzhou's GDP target for that year is 950 billion yuan ($121 billion), if there is the projected 12 percent annual growth from 2006.

Zhang said financial support would be a priority for local high-tech enterprises' R&D.

The industries of information technology, software and biological medicine are among the city's pillar high-tech industries that will get the "special attention" of the city government, he added.

"I'm all for the government's priority to use high-tech products developed by local companies," Jin Kechao, general manager of a local software firm, told China Daily.

Editor: Donald