The National Advanced Manufacturing Conference convened in Beijing from September 16 to 17, marking a pivotal gathering during the opening year of the "15th Five-Year Plan" period. This significant assembly underscores both the critical role of advanced manufacturing in China's broader modernization efforts and signals a clear commitment to strengthening this sector further.
The "15th Five-Year Plan" outlines maintaining a reasonable share of manufacturing and building a modern industrial system anchored by advanced manufacturing. China's manufacturing sector currently stands at a crucial juncture of transformation from large to strong, with its value-added output accounting for nearly 30% of the global total. From January to August, the national industrial output above designated size grew by 5.3% year-on-year, with emerging sectors such as high-tech manufacturing and digital product manufacturing contributing over 50% to this growth. However, the sector still grapples with significant challenges including mismatches between factor supply and industrial demand, regional development disparities, and insufficient coordination in industrial organization.
Cross-sector integration serves as a vital driver for advanced manufacturing development. An artificial intelligence eyewear product integrating AI, sensors, wireless communications, translation, navigation, and voice recognition services exemplifies this trend. Similarly, Hefei's Luogang Park showcases over ten typical scenarios spanning tourism, cultural experiences, and high-speed inspection, providing practical applications for new technologies. Recent years have witnessed breakthroughs across information technology, new materials, and biotechnology, creating convergence points that spawn highly integrated innovative products and comprehensive application scenarios. Unlike traditional factor-driven growth models, cross-sector integration enables technological reuse, resource consolidation, and value reconfiguration, connecting manufacturing and digital technologies with urban applications and livelihood needs while activating industrial growth through novel business models.
This integration approach serves dual purposes: it pressures traditional manufacturing to eliminate outdated capacity and achieve intelligent, green upgrades while revitalizing existing industries; simultaneously, it breaks down industrial iteration barriers, nurturing new technologies, models, and business formats that open fresh pathways for future industries and foster a healthy ecosystem for industrial advancement. Various regions have embarked on distinctive upgrading trajectories through scenario openness and business model innovation. Hubei has moved from single-domain integration to comprehensive coordination, explicitly promoting deep integration between advanced manufacturing and modern services while driving the interconnected development of the real economy, digital economy, and primary, secondary, and tertiary industries. Guangdong has proposed "five pluses" and "five types of manufacturing" including "advanced manufacturing plus services," translating high-end, intelligent, green, and integrated development into executable industrial frameworks.
Looking ahead, sustaining the growth of advanced manufacturing requires more than isolated technological breakthroughs; it demands an integrated development mindset. Market entities need to proactively connect with digital technologies, urban scenarios, livelihood needs, and global markets, using cross-sector innovation to reshape products, business formats, and commercial models. Industrial development must continuously dismantle industry, regional, and supply-demand barriers, establishing an integrated ecosystem encompassing technological empowerment, scenario implementation, industrial clustering, and service support. Concurrently, deep exploration of frontier cross-sector applications should continue, fostering close coupling between manufacturing and artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and other cutting-edge fields to incubate future industry growth points.
Advanced manufacturing has emerged as a key battlefield in international competition. Developing this sector fundamentally means promoting deep integration of technological and industrial innovation while cultivating and advancing new productive forces. Accordingly, we must align with the latest technological revolution and industrial transformation trends, maintain the direction of intelligent, green, and integrated development, and persistently advance cross-sector scenarios and business model convergence. This approach will fully unleash market innovation vitality, drive qualitative and efficiency improvements in Chinese manufacturing, and secure competitive advantages in the global industrial transformation.