National science center receives the green light

The construction of a new integrated national science center has been approved for the Shanghai Zhangjiang National Innovation Demonstration Zone to help the city fulfill its quest to become a global science and technology hub.

The Shanghai Municipal Development and Reform Commission confirmed the approval from the country's top economic planner and the Ministry of Science and Technology on Monday.

The center will assist China in competing and cooperating on the global stage in science and technology, with construction of its foundation framework scheduled to be complete by 2020.

Advanced scientific and technological infrastructure will be established in the center, as it strives to meet its main objectives of forming cross-disciplinary scientific research networks and exploring new forms of organization and management for major scientific and technological projects, according to officials.

Such a center was first suggested by Shanghai Mayor Yang Xiong a year ago.

"A national science center could help consolidate the resources of government, universities, research institutes and enterprises and be an experimental place for institutional innovations, focused on solving prominent problems such as insufficient originality, a lack of commercialized research, and the shortage of high-end talent," Yang said during the national annual gatherings of legislators and political advisers in Beijing in March last year.

In addition to existing major facilities such as the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility, the National Center for Protein Science and the Shanghai Supercomputer Center, other significant facilities that cost billions of yuan each will also be constructed, Jin Ying, deputy director of the management committee of Zhangjiang, was quoted as saying by Science and Technology Daily.