China tops 47th WorldSkills Competition medal tally

Chinese contestants secured the top spot at the 47th WorldSkills Competition medal tally by winning 36 of the 59 gold medals, as the competition concluded in Lyon, France on Sunday night.

In addition to their gold medals, the Chinese team won nine silvers, four bronzes and eight medallions of excellence. They also achieved their fifth successive championship in CNC Milling and forth successive championship in the Bricklaying and Fashion Technology, respectively.

Two Chinese participants in the Industry 4.0 competition were honored with the prestigious Albert Vidal Award for achieving the highest overall score in the event.

“We won gold medals in 36 of the 59 events in the competition. We made many breakthroughs this year. We maintained our leading position in Manufacturing and Engineering Technology and Construction and Building Technology. And we also made breakthroughs in Information and Communication Technology and Social and Personal Services, which is really not easy,” said Wu Liduo, deputy head of the Chinese delegation.

At the closing ceremony, the WorldSkills flag was officially passed from Lyon to the Chinese city of Shanghai, which will host the 48th edition of the competition.

This year’s event, held on Sept 10-15 with the events running on Sept 11-14, drew around 1,400 participants from nearly 70 countries and regions to compete in the 59 skill categories. Sixty-eight Chinese contestants participated in all the skill categories.

Shanghai, a leading force for Chinese modernization, is accelerating the pace of building itself into a science and technology innovation center with global influence.

The tech-savvy metropolis is now speeding up the transition from structure building to function strengthening. Taking strengthening the capability of fostering original sci-tech innovations as the main task, it is pursuing both sci-tech innovation and institutional innovation to significantly improve its comprehensive strength in science and technology as well as the overall effects of innovations.

Over the past 10 years since Shanghai began building itself into an international science and technology innovation center, it has reaped fruitful results in sci-tech innovation, which has pushed the metropolis’ GDP across the 4-trillion-yuan (about 570 billion U.S. dollars) mark.

In 2023, Shanghai’s total research and development expenditure accounted for 4.4 percent of its GDP, and the city’s fiscal expenditure on science and technology rose by 36.7 percent to 52.8 billion yuan (about 7.47 billion U.S. dollars).

Driven by science and technology advances, Shanghai’s industrial transformation has sped up. The combined scale of the three leading industries of artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, and biomedicine in the city has reached 1.6 trillion yuan (about 226 billion U.S. dollars).

At the National Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Science City, Qinglong, an open-source general-purpose humanoid robot with a height of 182 centimeters and up to 43 active degrees of freedom, is being trained to pick up oranges.

“After some training, the robot will be able to complete this move by itself when it encounters a similar scenario in the future,” said Shi Zhihua, trainer of robot Qinglong.

Thanks to an advanced control software, Qinglong can skillfully perform fast walking, avoid obstacles, go uphill and downhill, and resist impact.

“We plan to build a venue that can simultaneously train 1,000 robots by 2027,” Shi said.

The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), a third-generation medium-energy synchrotron light source facility with 46 laboratories, has been operating around the clock to serve researchers from around the country, whose experiments cover a wide range of fields such as life sciences, materials science and chemical catalysis.

“We are using the SSRF’s light to observe the phase change process of this material when it’s heated to 1,100 degrees Celsius,” said Song Shuang, a PhD candidate of Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“Our team is developing materials for the energy sector,” said Miao Zhikai, a researcher of Tianjin University.

“We are developing cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries,” said Li Guodong, a researcher of Fudan University.

Though the laboratories at the SSRF have been running at full capacity, researchers still have to apply for them months in advance, reflecting the vibrancy of innovation in Shanghai.