In the public interest.
Smart City is a key focus.
This excerpt is from the Chinese approved paper:
https://www.smart-eco-cities.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Wuhan-accepted-manuscript-March-2018.pdf
Wuhan is central China’s most populous city, with approximately 10 million residents in 2017. Historically known as the ‘Center of the whole Empire’ (Rowe 1984, cited in Han and Wu 2004: 349), the city is promoted by the Wuhan Bureau of Commerce (2010: 2) as the logistical ‘heart of China’, and the ‘largest transportation hub for land, water and air travel. Its strategic location links the East with the West, and the South with the North’. The national State Council has formally recognized Wuhan as the most important shipping centre in the middle sections of the Yangtze river (van de Bovenkamp and Fei 2016: 2)…Our discussion of Wuhan’s smart city activities begins by interpreting them through the lens of national policy, as a particular ‘translation’ of a global policy discourse. The case for considering the influential effects of national policy on urban development may seem self-evident – and yet its role is often underemphasised or overlooked in discussions of city-specific initiatives (Joss and Cowley 2017) that are not ‘top-down’ flagship projects, such as Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates (Cugurullo 2016). As discussed below, Chinese smart city development is not solely determined by the national government, but is nevertheless more clearly driven from the centre than is typically the case in, for example, European cities.
Below is an article from the China Daily about Wuhan as a Smart city.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-11/16/content_15935840.htm
Wuhan to become smart city by 2020
Updated: 2012-11-16 11:11
BARCELONA, Spain – Wuhan, capital of Central China’s Hubei province, aims to become a leading city in terms of applying technology to improve the lives of its citizens, the vice-mayor of the city said.
Shao Weimin, the vice-mayor of Wuhan, made the remarks during a speech to the 2012 Smart City Expo World Congress held from Nov 13 to 15 in Barcelona, Spain.
The city is among the first batch of cities in China to pilot the smart city program, it is also the first city in the world to hold an open tender to global companies for intelligent city designs.
The concept of “smart city” was initially raised by IBM, before that various names, such as digital city and intelligent city, have been used to describe using information technology to run a city more efficiently.
According to IBM, a smart city is an instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent city. While Forrester, a research and advisory firm, defines smart city as “the use of smart computing technologies to make the critical infrastructure components and services of a city—which include city administration, education, healthcare, public safety, real estate, transportation, and utilities—more intelligent, interconnected, and efficient.”
Wuhan plans to finish the information technology infrastructure construction by the year 2015 and by the year 2020 a smart Wuhan will be in place, according to Shao.
The city has already launched several programs to improve citizens’ lives and offer more convenience. A municipal administrative service center which provides 24-hour self-service public service has been set up. Wuhan also launched a two-dimensional code food tracing system to ensure food safety and water resource monitoring system to protect the environment, Shao told the congress.