CGTN published an article on why Chinese President Xi Jinping chose a tech hub in Beijing’s Yizhuang for his first domestic inspection tour in 2026. Using Yizhuang as a focal point, the article highlights China’s broader national strategy to build world-class science and technology innovation centers while linking these efforts to major recent breakthroughs and the positioning of innovation as the central engine of development at the start of the 15th Five-Year Plan period.
When runners set off alongside humanoid robots in a half-marathon in Beijing’s Yizhuang area in April last year, the finish line was not a stadium or a public square, but a national information technology innovation park.
The race, the first in the world to feature humans and humanoid robots competing on the same course, offered a glimpse of how far China’s push into frontier technologies has gone.
On Monday, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the same park, launching his first domestic inspection tour of the year. During the visit, Xi viewed displays of representative sci-tech innovation outcomes and spoke with researchers and executives from tech firms.
Self-reliance and strength in science and technology are the keys to building China into a great modern socialist country, Xi said.
The park in Yizhuang has become one of China’s most concentrated showcases of that vision. Anchored in the domestically developed information technology sector, the park has expanded its industrial layout to cover artificial intelligence, quantum information, 6G communications and intelligent hardware. More than 1,000 companies have set up operations there, forming a full industrial chain ecosystem seen as central to strengthening China’s technological foundations.
From the park, the picture widens to Beijing as a whole. Over the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021–2025), the capital has further strengthened its innovation capacity. It ranks among the world’s top cities in research and development spending intensity, leads Chinese cities in the number of unicorn companies, and has seen the number of high-value invention patents per 10,000 people and nationally recognized specialized “little giant” firms double since 2020. Several trillion-yuan and hundred-billion-yuan industrial clusters have also taken shape.
Xi’s tour in Yizhuang fits into a broader national layout. At the annual Central Economic Work Conference in 2025, China set out plans to build three international science and technology innovation centers in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Over the past year, Xi has inspected innovation development in Shanghai and Guangdong. With his visit to Yizhuang, his footprint has now covered all three regions central to this strategy.
The push has been accompanied by a series of landmark achievements. China’s space station has entered normalized operations, the Chang’e-6 mission returned samples from the far side of the moon and the Haidou-1 submersible completed deep-sea tests at depths of 10,000 meters. Meanwhile, 5G mobile communications have been deployed at scale, the Beidou navigation system now provides global services and the C919 aircraft has begun commercial flights. China also leads the world in new energy vehicle production and sales, high-speed rail technology, ultra-high-voltage power transmission, and renewable energy installations.
These advances have begun to register internationally. The World Intellectual Property Organization’s 2025 Global Innovation Index ranked China 10th globally, its first entry into the top 10, and the highest among upper-middle-income economies, marking a rise of 25 places since 2013.
Looking ahead, technology is set to carry even greater weight. The year 2026 marks the start of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030). Planning recommendations identify substantial improvements in technological self-reliance and strength as a major objective.
That emphasis was reinforced last month when the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee held its group study session, focusing on the forward-looking deployment of future industries.
Presiding over the session, Xi called for fully leveraging the new system for nationwide mobilization of resources, intensifying efforts to achieve breakthroughs in core technologies in key fields, strengthening forward-looking and systematic layout of basic research and accelerating the application and commercialization of sci-tech achievements.
As China begins the opening chapter of its new five-year plan, innovation is being positioned not as a supporting pillar but as the central engine driving its development path.
