On the morning of February 9, President Xi Jinping visited the National Xinchuang Park in Yizhuang, Beijing, examining displays of information-technology application innovation and meeting researchers and senior executives from technology firms. The visit — reported by state media Xinhua — included a tour of representative technological achievements and a review of Beijing’s efforts to accelerate the construction of an international science and technology innovation centre.
The National Xinchuang Park is a focal point in Beijing’s campaign to cultivate domestic alternatives across software, hardware and cloud infrastructure. “Xinchuang” (信息技术应用创新) refers to an ecosystem of home-grown operating systems, chips, databases and enterprise software designed to replace or reduce dependence on foreign suppliers in sensitive sectors such as government, finance and key industries.
Xi’s presence at the park is both managerial and symbolic: it signals top-level attention to the drive for “科技自立自强” (technological self-reliance), and offers public encouragement to researchers and companies working on arguably strategic, harder-to-commodify technologies. Direct engagement with project teams and corporate leaders also serves to tighten the political integration of China’s innovation ecosystem, aligning private-sector activity with national priorities.
For Beijing, the stated aim is to build an international-class innovation centre that can attract talent, capital and collaboration while shoring up domestic capabilities. The Xinchuang initiative has already prompted procurement shifts in government and state-run enterprises toward domestically certified stacks, and the park’s role is to incubate products that can scale into those procurement pipelines.
The immediate policy implication is more resources and regulatory support for firms aligned with the Xinchuang agenda. That translates into accelerated funding, procurement advantages and preferential access to demonstration projects. For smaller vendors, proximity to the park and demonstrable alignment with state objectives may become an increasingly important competitive advantage.
Internationally, the visit underscores China’s continued tilt toward strategic technological decoupling in selected areas. As Beijing doubles down on domestic substitutes for core IT components, foreign vendors face commercial and regulatory headwinds in markets where Xinchuang solutions are being promoted, particularly in government and critical infrastructure.
Xi’s visit should therefore be read as part of a longer-term, state-directed effort to reshape the contours of China’s tech sector: moving beyond catch-up manufacturing to entrench domestic platforms, secure supply chains and concentrate innovation in politically prioritized clusters. For global observers, the gesture is a reminder that China’s innovation policy is driven not only by market incentives but by an explicit national-security-inflected industrial strategy.