Xi Jinping’s bold plan for China’s next phase of innovation

THINGS AREAI looking bright for Zhuzhou. The city of 4m people in landlocked Hunan province has often caught the runoff of industrial business from the more populous provincial capital, Changsha, to its north. In the 1990s it became a regional hub for chemicals and metals production. But that caused horrible environmental destruction; more than 1,000 polluters were eventually shut down, with dire economic consequences. Zhuzhou’s inland economy has remained behind that of coastal cities. Over the past decade its moderate growth has been typical of the mid-tier cities that dot China’s interior.Now, however, its officials talk as if it were a tech hub. Hundreds of artificial-intelligence (), robotics and data companies have sprung up in the past year. Local planning documents reflect the exuberance of a boomtown in the making, something Zhuzhou could only watch from afar in the 1990s as eastern ports became rich.