TASS, June 24. Representative offices of at least 11 Chinese universities as well as 17 research institutes operate on the territory of Yazhou Modern Agricultural Park (Hainan province, South China). According to the Hainan Daily newspaper, these include the Shanghai Jiao Tong University the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other institutions.

The publication notes that since its establishment in 2019, the Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City aims to strengthen science and technology capacity and become a high-tech innovation center and is a part of the construction of the Hainan Free Trade Port. The newspaper writes that in recent years, the Yazhou science city has achieved notable results in finding partners and attracting investment, developing production chains, and creating favorable conditions for doing business.

The article highlights that a total of 7,043 enterprises are currently registered on the territory of the agricultural park, including one of the largest selective breeding companies in the world, KWS SAAT (based in Germany) China Seed, China State Shipbuilding Corporation, China Telecommunications, the Chinese technology company for artificial intelligence and speech recognition iFLYTEK and many others. A total of 131 high-tech enterprises of China and more than 80 companies with foreign capital operate in the science city.

According to the publication, the science city is also focused on attracting highly qualified personnel. To date, educational institutions located in Yazhou have trained more than 1.2 thousand doctoral students. There are teams of scientists working in the park.

The Yazhou Agricultural Science and Technology Cluster was established in 2019. Its total area is about 70 square kilometers. The agricultural park includes the Nanfang agricultural selective breeding base: so far, scientists have been able to breed more than 20,000 new crop varieties there, which is about 70% of China's national figure.

On June 1, 2020, the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the State Council of China published a program creating the Hainan free trade port. The document covers the creation of a special customs zone on this tropical island. The Chinese authorities intend to generally complete the free port’s construction in 2025 - by that time, the island should have a mechanism in place to ensure open trade and investment. By 2035, the authorities plan to secure free trade and investment, cross-border movement of capital, travel, and freight traffic in Hainan.