By Bartek Suleiman
The Chinese city most affected by COVID-19 in the early months of last year, Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, is said to be undergoing an economic revival.
Since becoming much tarnished name on the international stage, Wuhan has since been become the country’s 10 economically best-performing cities. Now, it is eyeing something even bigger, and the first step is to expand its technological advances.
High-tech sectors have reportedly contributed to more than a quarter of Wuhan’s economic growth in 2020, and the Hubei provincial government just rolled out key national laboratories for optical, space and biological technology.
Wuhan has been battered by bad press since the beginning of the pandemic, after being initially identified as the source of the global killer which brought all our lives to a standstill.
Virus Detection
Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province was the first place in the world that the virus was detected in 2019, leading to millions of deaths reported worldwide
Experts said the virus is likely to have originated in animals before spreading to humans, but they are not sure how.
However, last year, Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) mission, said it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus spread from a lab leak in the city of Wuhan.
He said more work was needed to identify the source of the virus.
Meanwhile, a dark database hidden by China is believed to be the smoking gun which proves Covid DID leak from a Wuhan lab, a study has claimed.
The Sun Online last month revealed that a closely guarded cache of information is believed to include unpublished samples of data on new viruses and hidden bat collection sties.
“We’re preparing talents and reserved technology for targeted industries,” Xia Song, chairman of Research Center Committee of Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics. The lab is located in Wuhan’s high-tech zone, better known as the Optics Valley of China.
Two world-class industrial clusters worth trillions of yuan are currently under construction.
Wuhan-based automaker Dongfeng, one of the country’s top three motor manufacturing bases expressed confidence in the technological developments and the future.
Tang Teng from Dongfeng’s strategic planning department said in a statement:
“We have to rethink the life cycle of R&D, manufacturing, consumption and service,” said Tang Teng from Dongfeng’s strategic planning department. “Given the local government’s plan to create an auto valley in China, we will step up efforts to master core technologies to make this our edge in market competency.”
Given the large-scale manufacturing achievement, Wuhan is ambitious to build a high-tech automobile valley.
“Electronic information and alternative energy enterprises related to vehicle networking have already clustered in the auto valley,” according to Gu Xiaoyan, a researcher at Wuhan Academy of Social Sciences.
“Now, it seeks more talents from home and abroad and further improvements in key parts of the industrial chain,” Gu said.
China remains under strict sanctions from the Trump administration.
On Monday, China’s top diplomat called on the US to drop the sanctions and restrictions introduced by Donald Trump and warned against international “hegemony and bullying” and interference in what Beijing considers internal affairs, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the South China Sea.
During China’s annual National People’s Congress (NPC), the country’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, expressed Beijing’s determination to combat international criticism of its perceived expansionist and hostile activity and domestic human rights abuses.