The municipalities of Beijing and Shanghai, and the city of Shenzhen in Guangdong province, top the national list for the development of innovative talent, but smaller cities are catching up in driving the country’s innovative development push, according to a recent report. The latest ranking of the top three spots remained unchanged from last year, according to the 2023 China Innovative Talents Index. The report, compiled by Shenzhen Talent Group and Tsinghua University’s Research Center for Technological Innovation, bases its results on the evaluation of four major indicators – talent scale, structure, performance and environment – which are divided into 10 sub-indicators. Fifty-eight cities across the country are covered in the research.
Beijing’s talent development is balanced, with the nation’s capital in the top position nationwide in all of the four major indicators. Shanghai grabbed second place in three of the four except talent structure, in which it was overshadowed by Shenzhen, known as China’s Silicon Valley. The performance of innovative talent in Shenzhen and the city’s talent environment ranked third, but it lagged behind the provincial capital Guangzhou in terms of talent scale. The metropolis of Guangzhou, one of China’s four first-tier cities alongside Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, dropped one place to fifth in the overall ranking. It was replaced by Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, where e-commerce titan Alibaba Group is headquartered. The release of the report comes as China is making intensified efforts to develop a sound innovation ecosystem to pave the way for its high-quality development. Innovative talent is believed to be a vital part in the building of such an ecosystem.
Chen Jin, Director of the Research Center for Technological Innovation, said the launch of the report is aimed at providing dynamic and sustainable data support for the country’s construction of a global innovation hub and a high-quality talent pool. Although top Chinese cities are dominating the cultivation and introduction of innovative talent, the index also indicated that second-tier cities are rapidly catching up. Wuxi in Jiangsu province advanced to the top 10 list, ranking 10th. Yantai and Qingdao, both in Shandong province, jumped 14 and seven places, respectively, over a three-year period to position themselves as the 32nd and 13th strongest cities in the field. Zheng Yongnian, Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), emphasized the importance of high-level opening-up in nurturing innovative talent. China’s internationalization has trailed that of New York and San Francisco, where 40% of the population is foreign, indicating their internationalized level, he said. According to the Global Innovation Index 2023, a separate report published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in September, China ranked 12th among 132 economies across the world, the China Daily reports.
Meanwhile, Chinese cities are rapidly growing in high-quality scientific research while American and European rivals are dropping, according to a global ranking of top science cities by Nature Index. The “Leading 200 Science Cities” list tracks research output by measuring contributions to academic articles published in 82 of the world’s most influential natural science journals from 2015 to 2022. A total of 32 cities in mainland China made the 2023 list, and almost all of them climbed up the rankings compared to their positions on last year’s list, with only one exception, Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi province. Five out of the top 10 cities on the 2023 list are in mainland China, and Beijing once again ranks as the top science city in the world. The top five cities – Beijing, New York, Shanghai, Boston, and the San Francisco Bay Area – remained unchanged. The other 18 mainland Chinese cities that made the top 50 jumped to a higher ranking compared to last year, while most major cities outside China, including Tokyo, Paris and London, fell. The only exception was Seoul, which rose two spots.
The city of Hefei in Anhui province surpassed both Los Angeles and London in the score that determines the Nature Index rankings – rising by three places to 13th on this year’s list. When Nature first launched the global science city ranking in 2018, there were just 10 Chinese cities in the top 50. Six years later, that number has already doubled, the South China Morning Post reports.
