When it comes to China's regional digitalization, we will most likely focus on two dimensions. One is the super-large cities represented by Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The implementation of smart cities here is the vane and the vanguard; the other is the digitalization and intelligence of the countryside. Revitalization" call.
Have you ever noticed that there is a place that seems to be "folded" from this perspective? That is the counties and towns scattered across the land of China.
Most counties often lack very distinctive and powerful pillar industries, and it is difficult to capture the value of digitalization from industrial upgrading. At the same time, its own investment in digitization and intelligence is limited, and it cannot make too much advanced investment. Coupled with the limitations of talents, service providers, and previous digital foundations, the intelligentization of the county needs to be carefully crafted, and big things can be done with a small amount of money.
In the past two years, everyone often discussed topics such as young people in small towns, as if they could be compared with young people working hard in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Then let's start from some counties' intelligence cases that we have visited, and talk about the rising new market of smart counties.
The digitalization and intelligentization of county towns constitute an indispensable aspect of Smart China, and constitute the possibility of large-scale replication of digital and intelligent achievements.
To seize this opportunity, we need to start from understanding the uniqueness of smart counties.
Smart county, when the wind blows again
Up to now, the smart city industry has experienced 20 years of development in China. All prefecture-level cities in China already have smart city projects. In super-large first-tier cities, there are thousands of smart city projects. Under this trend, it is inevitable for smart cities to penetrate from big cities to counties, townships, and towns.
2020 can be seen as a clear breakdown. In this year, a series of policies were issued at the national level to promote the construction and development of county-level smart cities. For example, in May 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission issued the "Notice on Accelerating the Work of Strengthening Weaknesses in the Urbanization of Counties", pointing out that a new image of "smart counties" should be created at a high level, and smart urban management, smart transportation, and smart public services should be promoted in an orderly manner. Construction of key scenarios such as security, smart community, and smart ecology.
Guided by policies, agents, integrators, and equipment suppliers of smart city projects have also begun to expand their markets to county towns. At the same time, some relatively new urban intelligent technologies, such as cloud-network collaboration, unified network management, and urban digital twins, have been brought to the county-level market. Some counties have also begun to build new digital infrastructure such as data centers. After the smart city boom 20 years ago, today's smart county can be said to be "when the wind is blowing again".
Generally speaking, the demand for digitalization and intelligence in county towns is higher than that in big cities. However, the specific requirements are simpler and more flexible than that of big cities. At the same time, the investment in individual projects is lower. In the selection of suppliers, more consideration should be given to quotation factors rather than technological advancement. In general, the smart county project mainly has three construction purposes:
1. Through intelligent technology, promote the improvement of security, government affairs, environmental supervision and other aspects of the metropolitan area. Digital projects such as Xueliang Project and smart transportation have been popularized in counties in the developed eastern regions.
2. Empower characteristic industries with intelligent technology to achieve the goal of going global and retaining talents. Many counties in the central and western regions have vigorously developed the model of agriculture/animal husbandry/breeding + smart photovoltaics, which can be regarded as the digital superposition of the original industrial location.
3. Grasp the business opportunities brought by intelligence and develop new industrial patterns, especially hoping to share the intelligent industrial locations of big cities and provincial capitals that cannot be accommodated due to high land costs. Under this trend, data centers and digital industrial bases began to settle in counties.
However, at the current stage, the promotion of smart cities in county areas still faces many challenges.
Between "must do" and "how to use"
At the current stage, the development of smart counties is still in a relatively early stage. Major digital suppliers have already laid service networks and sales channels to the county-level market, but the overall market feedback is not clear enough. Relatively speaking, problems such as the slow pace of promotion of digitization projects in many counties, unclear selection mechanisms, and weak ability to return funds have been exposed.
Behind these superficial problems are the digital and intelligent projects in the county, many of which need to face heavy infrastructure burdens and weak software and operation and maintenance capabilities.
For example, in some digital projects in counties we have visited, more than half of the total investment is used for the cost of purchasing computing power. This leads to very limited costs that can be left for product procurement, integration, and construction, which in turn leads to a continuous slowdown in the efficiency of project advancement in the middle and later stages.
Another situation is that the demand positioning of many smart county projects is not clear enough, which makes the project results easy to pass the acceptance. We once interviewed a person in charge of a provincial digitalization project in the east. When they reviewed the achievements of the province's digitalization construction, they found that county-level projects were uneven. Even some digital systems can only be used by a few people, and if the number of visits reaches double digits, there will be downtime.
Expensive computing power and few talents have become the main challenges for the development of the smart county market.
On the whole, the current digital and intelligent projects in the county are between the "must do" following the national policy and the "how to use" that many projects have only been reported for visits.
The digitization project in the county requires careful calculation and cost saving, and at the same time, it must be able to directly and concisely bring value to the local area, and excessive investment and long-term planning should not be carried out. Only in this way can we reduce the cost of implementation, promote the scale replication of digital projects in counties, and at the same time produce relatively clear standards for acceptance and bidding, and minimize the rent-seeking space in digitalization.
smart transportation
Suitable to start from the county seat
Corresponding to the just-started industrial stage, China has accumulated a lot of unique leading experience in the digital and intelligent development of counties. Next, based on our visit experience, we can talk about a few projects with great potential in the digital market of Chinese counties.
The first is smart transportation.
In the intelligent transportation industry, there is a concept called "intelligence of the whole district". Its technical logic is to cooperate with traffic lights, checkpoints, and traffic cameras through AI to conduct coordinated and linked intelligent traffic command in an entire area.
If this kind of technical ability is only used at a few intersections or one or two connections, it is difficult to release greater value, but if the overall intelligence of the entire area is implemented, the effect will be greatly improved.
In big cities, the cost of traffic transformation in the entire area is very high, and there are many difficulties, and it is easy to cause problems that affect the whole body in the city. However, county towns often do not have such a burden, and can exert the maximum effect of intelligent transportation in the whole district.
In a county in central China that we interviewed, through AI cameras, AI traffic light transformation, and the construction of a traffic command hall, the county can realize the aggregation and real-time feedback of more than 50,000 video resources. As a result, the traffic efficiency has been greatly improved, and the supervision ability of illegal parking inspection, water intrusion and illegal dumping has been strengthened.
Intelligent transportation has been done for many years, but the thunder is loud and the rain is little. One of the most important obstacles is the complex transportation network and the transformation of the environment in big cities. The county seat can just become a stage for intelligent transportation to show its talents.
Everything under the light
The digitalization and intelligentization of counties are often not the coordinated development of various industries, but the first point to make a feature.
For most counties, agriculture, animal husbandry, and breeding are core industries. These industries are currently the most distinctive in China, and the digital transformation that can receive the most relevant support is the combination with smart photovoltaics.
In today's China, if you travel around, you can see various primary industry ecology hidden under the photovoltaic panels. Seabuckthorn and wolfberry are grown under sunlight in Northwest China; shrimp and crabs are raised under photovoltaic panels in water towns in the south of the Yangtze River; mushrooms and medicinal materials are grown under sunlight in South China... It can be said that today there are only things you can't think of, and there are things that can't be produced without photovoltaic panels.
The combination of photovoltaics and the primary industry not only conforms to the dual-carbon policy, promotes the rise of photovoltaic power stations, photovoltaic energy storage and other industries, but also accelerates the industrialization and industrialization of agriculture, forming a multi-industry linkage measure.
Combined with the "county-wide promotion" policy of photovoltaics going to the countryside, smart photovoltaics are constantly playing a more important role in the digitalization process of Chinese counties.
Become a link in the smart chain
There is a saying in the AI industry that the data you use to train your model in the afternoon may have been cleaned up in which county or village in the morning.
This kind of digital industry collaboration between big cities, towns, and rural areas is actually a unique opportunity for the development of smart counties. At present, most of China's digital enterprises and scientific and technological talents with industrial influence are concentrated in megacities. A previous data showed that more than 90% of China's AI computing power is consumed by the top technology companies. Most of these companies are concentrated in megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. However, the cost of land, energy, and talents in big cities is high. Therefore, it will be the general trend in the future to move industrial areas such as computing power, product production lines, software outsourcing, and big data cleaning in the digital chain to the county level. The project of counting from east to west was born to solve similar problems.
In response to the industrial spillover effect of big cities in the promotion of digital China, many counties are seizing the opportunity to promote the construction of digital infrastructure such as data centers, supercomputers, digital product production lines, and black light factories, so as to divert the digital industrial locations of big cities. Include yourself as a link in the smart chain.
A truly excellent digital project should be able to help the county to revitalize industries, gather talents, and create jobs. Guided by these goals, it is also a good way for the digital industry to go deep into the county.
Generally speaking, smart counties have developed greatly in China today. It has a clear policy orientation, and has accumulated a series of experience and supply chains for smart projects in large cities, and has explored some distinctive "China Smart County" models. After better overcoming the ambiguity and formalism in related projects, the digital development of Chinese counties is worth looking forward to.
