Beijing Vice-Mayor Fan Boyuan yesterday vowed that the Zhongguancun high-tech hub, dubbed China's "Silicon Valley,'' is on track to double its 2001 turnover by 2005.

The park achieved 45.6 billion yuan (US$5.5 billion) in industrial added value, and income of 201.4 billion yuan (US$24.3 billion) in 2001.

"This year is the beginning of the new era of development,'' Fan, the official in charge of scientific development and education, told members of the Standing Committee of the Beijing Municipal People's Congress (BMPC) yesterday at a regular conference.

Industries concerned with mobile phones, computers, digital images and biological chips -- those could be fitted into human body -- will be given priority, with the aim of promoting sustainable and rapid development of the area's high-tech industries, he said.

In order to solve funding problems, the Beijing municipal government and commercial banks will, this year, provide it with a greater level of financial support.

The local government has increased the special development fund from 1.5 billion yuan (US$181 million) to 1.8 billion yuan (US$217 million), to support the technological innovation, high-tech industry development and infrastructure facilities construction, said the vice-mayor.

Banks, including the China Development Bank, Beijing City Commercial Bank and CITIC Industrial Bank have provided lines of credit of over 30 billion yuan (US$3.6 billion) to enterprise in the park.

Although great achievements have been made at Zhongguancun, Fan pointed out enterprises still needed to do more to protect their intellectual property rights (IPR).

"The number of patent applications put forward by the companies is far less than it should be according to current conditions,'' he said.

To address this problem, construction of a State-level IPR system demonstration park at Zhongguancun will be accelerated.

Established jointly by the State Intellectual Property Office and the Beijing municipal government, the IPR demonstration programme is expected to set up an IPR promotion organization for Zhongguancun. The move will help enterprise fight the problem of pirated software.

Despite the negative impact brought by the outbreak of SARS in the capital, Zhongguancun achieved an industrial added value of 21.5 billion yuan (US$2.6 billion) in the first half year, 13.2 per cent up on last year.

The total income of the area reached 104.8 billion yuan (US$12.7 billion) in the first six months and taxation was 4.85 billion yuan (US$586 million).

The park has become the biggest base for software and integrated circuit designing companies. Software produced at Zhongguancun supplies 40 per cent of the domestic market, said sources.

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