Xiongan City Security Lab in north China's Hebei Province focuses on building city-level security and aims to promote the security strategy to the rest of China.

On April 1, Xiongan New Area, which has been designed to become a smart city, celebrated its fifth anniversary.

CGTN's reporter Guo Meiping sat down with Xia Junjie, director of Xiongan City Security Lab and deputy dean of China Unicom Smart City Research Institute, to talk about the lab's work in city security protection.

Edited for clarity and brevity, here are some excerpts from the interview with Xia.

CGTN: The lab focuses on the development of "city-level security," can you further explain this concept?

Xia: Traditionally, cities, industries or companies focus on a single aspect when doing security protection. Take transportation as an example; they might focus on protecting traffic data collection and traffic lights. So, the protection is on individual units. Let me use the Barrel Theory to explain that if there is one short slab, the whole city is under threat. We take a comprehensive view of the city, focusing on every aspect of the city, including the government, companies, and problems in residents' daily lives, and integrate them together. A city cannot exist without security, and the security capacity can be improved with data collected from the city.

CGTN: In the digital age, people are concerned about their privacy. How can we enhance the protection of personal data and institutional information security while boosting the construction of smart cities?

Xia: The faster the city develops, the more connection technology like 5G, AI, and big data has with people's privacy. The most important thing is to balance the use of data in technological applications and data supervision. I think China has been doing a great job in this aspect. The country enacted several laws in 2021 after the Cybersecurity Law in 2016. The first one was the Data Security Law, and the second one was the Personal Information Protection Law. I think the three higher-level laws have defined some basic policies in cybersecurity and data security applications. Our city security lab is city-oriented. Thus, we view data and privacy protection from the city level. Under the development of the digital economy, we will have many management measures for data collection, mining and promotion.

CGTN: China has been boosting the development of smart cities in recent years. How can Xiongan's strategy of the coexistence of city and security be promoted to the rest of the country?

Xia: I think Xiongan plays an important role, especially in technological innovation. But Xiongan is not innovating only for itself. Lots of the works we do are duplicatable and transferable, meaning lots of the innovative works we do in Xiongan will form some standards, from Xiongan's local industrial standard to national standards and even to international standards. We submitted our projects to ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) during the past years and achieved over 10 international standards. These standards summarize our works and valuable application experiences in Xiongan, so we can promote them across China and the world and let people realize that in the process of city management, we can benefit the city's development through some innovative technology, ideas and applications.

Videographer: Yu Yang

Video editor: Zhang Rongyi

Cover image: Xing Cheng