Yuki Lei in Shaoguan
Shaoguan Municipal Bureau of Development and Reform Director and Level ll Bureau Rank Official Guo Xiangui told a media delegation from Macau yesterday that the Shaoguan Data Centre Cluster – one of the eight national hub nodes in the integrated nationwide computing network – will cover Hong Kong and Macau by 2025.
Shaoguan is a prefecture-level city in northern Guangdong province bordering Hunan to the northwest and Jiangxi to the northeast. Its metro area, made up of Zhenjiang, Wujiang and Qujiang urban districts, had a population of one million as of the 2020 census.
Shaoguan lies some 290 kilometres north of Macau.
According to Guo’s briefing, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and three other central departments – Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission (OCCAC), Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), and National Energy Administration (NEA) – gave their green light for the construction of a national computing hub in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) last year.
Construction of the other seven national hub nodes, Guo pointed out, has been started in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Chengdu-Chongqing, Gansu, Guizhou, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia and the Yangtze River Delta with a total of 10 national data centre clusters planned in the hub nodes aiming to carry out collaborative construction between data centres and networks, cloud computing, and big data, and serve as the strategic fulcrum of the “Eastern Data and Western Computing” demonstration project, promoting the orderly transfer of computing resources to the west and the solution of the imbalance between the supply and demand of computing power between the nation’s east and the west.
The big data centre cluster in the Shaoguan High-tech Zone as its starting point, which aims to serve the whole Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, is currently mainly orientated towards the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, said Guo, who however, was quick to add that a real-time computing power centre will be built to meet the computing needs of southern China and even the whole country and to serve the GBA’s digital economy development.
In the next step, according to Guo, the Shaoguan government will work with the GBA to explore and create an innovative pattern of computing power integration, data integration, application integration and transaction integration, and the coordinated development of big data, to jointly promote the economic and social development of the GBA and Guangdong province.
Guo made the remarks during yesterday afternoon’s meeting with representatives of Macau’s Chinese, English- and Portuguese-language media.
Organised by the Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China in the Macau Special Administrative Region (MSAR), 19 journalists from Macau have joined a four-day visit to four cities – Dongguan, Guangzhou, Shaoguan and Shenzhen in Guangdong. The well-organised trip began on Sunday and will conclude tomorrow.
The fact-finding trip began with a guided tour of the National Archives of Publications and Culture Guangzhou Branch, which opened in July last year. According to a statement by the Foreign Affairs Office of the Guangdong People’s Government, the facility has become “a new cultural hallmark of Guangdong in the new era and provides a strong boost to the effort of building Guangdong into a powerful cultural province”.
Journalist José Carlos Matias, who heads the media delegation, said during Sunday’s dinner hosted by Guangdong Foreign Affairs Office Director General Liu Chenzi that it was the delegation’s honour to be one of the first non-mainland delegations to visit the newly-established museum, which he described as a database of the national archives of publication resources and CG (Corporate Governance) bank, adding he hoped that through this valuable visit, the delegation could gain in-depth understanding of the technological and cultural innovation projects of Guangdong cities in the GBA , building more bridges for exchanges and cooperation between Macau and the mainland.
According to Matias, this has been the first post-pandemic trip for the English- and Portuguese-language media to the GBA since 2020.
During the dinner at White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou on Sunday, Liu gave a brief introduction to Guangdong, in which she described the province as offering a good environment for living, working and travelling, boasting six characteristics, namely multiple superimposed major national strategic benefits, a sound industrial system and strong manufacturing industry, communities of science, technology and innovation, the commitment to different aspects of reform and opening-up in all aspects, providing an improved balance and coordination between urban and rural development, and continuous improvements in the quality of its ecological environment.
Guangdong Foreign Affairs Office Director General Liu Chenzi delivers a speech during Sunday’s dinner at White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, the first stop of a four-day fact-finding trip to the Greater Bay Area (GBA) by 19 journalists from Macau’s Chinese, English- and Portuguese-language media.
The delegation members visit the Huashao Data Vally in Shaoguan yesterday. – Photos: Yuki Lei
