Known for its coal and phosphate mines in the past, Guizhou, a picturesque province in southwest China, is digging into a new resource — data.
Guiyang, the capital of a province that is battling poverty, has been designated by Beijing as China’s first Big Data pilot zone. Taking the cue from the top, local authorities are now going all-out to woo the big guns of the global IT industry, hoping they would set up shop amid the thickly wooded hills, known for their dense greenery. They hope that when Chinese and foreign companies park mountains of their data on the clouds of the virtual world, it will spawn a downstream industry, which will transform the province.
It is not that Guizhou was always neglected. The province has been part of the folklore of the Long March — Chinese patriarch Mao Zedong’s epic escape with his Communist Party legions, who marched through some of the toughest terrain in China, when facing prospects of total annihilation from the rival Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek. But when China’s reforms began under Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor, inland provinces such as Guizhou suffered. Coastal Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen became the shiny new icons of China’s meteoric rise as the workshop of the world. But the left-behind provinces are now back in focus, after President Xi Jinping’s public declaration this year that poverty has to be eliminated by 2020.
The poverty hook
Once Beijing decided that Big Data will help remove Guizhou off the poverty hook, the local government went into overdrive to entice domestic and foreign heavyweights to the province. Already, their focussed exertions are paying off. State-of-the-art rent-free office spaces in the spanking Guiyang Science Park, concessional housing in trendy apartment blocks, and many other perks are making heads turn even in the hard-nosed cyberuniverse.
Local media has reported that Apple’s iCloud user data in China will be parked in the Guizhou-Cloud Big Data. Qualcomm, the U.S. chipmaker, will continue to partner the Guizhou government to develop server chips. Indian companies, especially small and medium enterprises (SME) too seem to be picking up the lucrative scent of Guiyang. “The story in Guiyang is of Indian small and medium software enterprises, which could be processing Big Data provided by their Chinese partners. The clients could be in the banking or the automobile sector, just to give you an example,” says Gagan Sabharwal, senior director, Global Trade Development, at the IT industry body Nasscom.
Mr. Sabharwal points out that an ecosystem exists in Guiyang for Indian and Chinese SMEs to flourish. He cites the example of Dell, which has recently worked out a deal with a local cloud service provider in Guizhou to set up the first cloud service for SMEs in the province. For Indian software companies wanting to do business in and from Guizhou, their first stop is likely to be the Sino-Indian Digital Collaborative Opportunities Plaza. This is a “match-making” platform, designed by Sujit Chatterjee, founder of a start-up Zeta-V, and his team. Indian and Chinese companies can log on to the platform.
The system then works out possibilities of compatibility between the two. Besides, a NASSCOM-IT corridor has been established, where Indian companies can set up their rent-free offices and take advantage of the existing business-friendly environment of the Guiyang Science Park.
