During this year's session of the provincial people's congress, Guangdong Governor Huang Huahua stressed the importance of independent innovation, "The province will improve policies to encourage and support self-innovation initiatives and help the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen turn into innovation pilot cities of the nation this year."

Guangdong's innovation capacity building campaign has won direct support from two state ministries: the State Education Ministry and State Technology Ministry. The three parties had a meeting in June in Guangzhou to discuss plans to further Guangdong's ties with top domestic universities and research and development institutes in innovation projects.

Guangdong's cooperation with State Education Ministry started in September 2005, when they signed an agreement to work together for the province's inn-ovation capacity improvement.

With the ministry's help, more than 70 top domestic universities started research and development projects with Guangdong enterprises. For example, Dongguan invested 400 million RMB to established five research units with Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine and University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Last year, local governments and enterprises invested 1.05 and 16.5 million RMB respectively in innovation. A total of 2,368 Guangdong manufacturers and 167 domestic universities launched up to 3,287 cooperation projects on innovation. These projects yielded a gross output of over 150 billion RMB, with an export exceeding 3 billion USD (23.4 billion RMB) and a tax surge of 23 billion RMB.

Editor: Donald