Just by maneuvering joysticks, one can drive a vehicle on the road from a simulator indoors and control turns and stops. This is no scene from a sci-fi movie, neither is it fantasy, it is actually happening in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality.

"The 5G-aided remote designated driving system can check the circumambient environment of a car, track its driving circumstance and realize remote control of the car," said a representative at one of the booths at the Smart China Expo (SCE) 2022 in Chongqing. 

According to a white paper released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) in July, China's digital economy increased to $7.1 trillion in 2021, second only to the U.S., which hit $15.3 trillion.

"The era of digital economy has begun, and digital transformation has become an inevitable choice for the development of human society," Mei Hong, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said at the opening ceremony of the expo. 

The digital economy has no doubt become the driving power of China's economy as shown in the white paper that the sector's average increase rate is 15.9 percent from 2012 to 2021, and the proportion of the digital economy in the country's GDP has increased from 20.9 percent to 39.8 percent, with an annual increase of 2.1 percent on average.

Promoting international collaboration

As one of the organizers of this year's SCE, the Singaporean Ministry of Trade and Industry brought 56 enterprises on board to showcase their expertise in digital technologies through online and offline displays inside the event's Singapore pavilion.

A total of 1,500 applications were presented by over 550 companies from 19 countries.

"We are confident about the Chinese market and the expo provides a great platform for companies between the two countries to communicate," said an official from Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). 

(Cover: A view of the Smart China Expo 2022 in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, August 21, 2022. /Xinhua)