Workers make flower crafts in Yuxian county, Yangquan city. [Photo/Yangquan Evening News]

Yuxian county located in Yangquan city, North China's Shanxi province, has made great progress in revamping itself.

Over the past few years, it has achieved great momentum in the high-quality transformation and development by optimizing its industrial structure, focusing on emerging industrial projects, improving government services and increasing support for recruitment and training. 

In 2018, Yuxian county put forward the goal for its economy to shift from being reliant on the coal-fired power industry to a diversified industrial structure, as its transformation target. 

To achieve that, the county has rolled out a series of measures, such as promoting the upgrading of the coal washing industry, expanding the scale of the power industry, as well as integrating and reorganizing the refractory materials industry. It has also improved the development of the building materials industry and sought breakthroughs in the energy conservation and environmental protection industries. 

Yuxian has focused on introducing projects involved in the clean energy, green building materials and general aviation sectors – as well as in the cultural tourism, health care and agricultural industries. 

From 2018 to 2020, more than 100 key projects worth a total of 15 billion yuan ($2.32 billion) were implemented and the output value of the strategic emerging industries grew 25.6 percent annually on average. The proportion of the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors of the local economy was adjusted to 2.9:52.5:44.6. 

As for government services, Yuxian county issued 20 measures designed to support small and medium-sized enterprises. Moreover, it built a new government service center, promoted online handling of government affairs and streamlined administrative procedures – so that the online project approval rate reached 100 percent and the average approval processing time was reduced by over 50 percent. 

From last year, the county began deploying hundreds of cadres to serve in local companies, helping them to resolve problems in project construction and operations, introduce COVID-19 pandemic prevention and control measures and resume production. 

As a result, the number of manufacturers there with annual revenue of over 100 million yuan in 2020 increased by 17 and the county's industrial added value rose 16.6 percent compared with the end of 2015.

In terms of recruitment and training, the county has built 105 talent apartments and two technology incubators, added 3,069 various market players and trained 97 technical employees and professionals.

It hired science and technology advisors to support 10 local leading agricultural product processing companies, and promoted the transformation and application of scientific and technological achievements.