BEIJING, Oct. 2 (Xinhua) -- Disc-shaped reels of iron-based superconducting tape, glinting with a metallic sheen, are sitting in the showroom of a company in Yizhuang, a high-tech zone in southeastern Beijing.
The company, Guoke Superconductor, is building what it says is the world's first mass production line for such wire and tape, with an annual capacity of around 100 km, and expects to complete it by the end of 2026.
"A fusion device needs 5,000 to 20,000 km of superconducting tape," said Zhang Xiaohu, the company's chairman, adding that the combined global capacity of all manufacturers in 2025 was not enough to support even one such device.
Superconducting materials conduct electricity with zero resistance under specific conditions, including very low temperatures. They are foundational to fields such as controlled nuclear fusion, advanced medical equipment and quantum information, but stable production of long-length superconductors at scale has proved difficult.
Founded in August 2025, Zhang's startup aims to take iron-based superconducting materials from the laboratory to industrial production, backed by Beijing's research institutes, high-end talent, and supportive advanced-manufacturing policies.
Yizhuang, officially the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area where the company is based, has given everything it needs to get off the ground. Covering 225 square km, or 1.37 percent of Beijing's land, Yizhuang contributed nearly 40 percent of the city's industrial added value, and its gross industrial output approached 700 billion yuan (about 104 billion U.S. dollars) last year.
FROM LAB TO MASS PRODUCTION
In a seven-story building at a cell therapy pilot base in Yizhuang, China's first approved stem cell drug is coming off a fully enclosed, automated production line.
The drug, amimestrocel injection, was approved in 2025 for steroid-refractory acute graft-versus-host disease -- a complication of stem cell transplants in which the donor's immune cells attack the recipient's tissues and that does not respond to standard steroid treatment. It has saved more than 700 critically ill patients so far, according to its developer, Platinumlife Biotechnology (Beijing) Co., Ltd.
"Once it enters the body, it is very much like a living drug factory, secreting active factors that promote tissue repair, mobilize the immune system and suppress inflammation," said Li Liang, the company's chief scientist.
Yet making a scalable drug out of mesenchymal stem cells takes more than innovation alone. In 2022, Beijing brought the company to Yizhuang as a key project, enabling it to crack the hard nut. The company developed three-dimensional suspension bioreactors and fully automated, closed production lines to replace manual cell culture, achieving consistent quality among different drug batches and reducing the cost to one-seventieth of a comparable therapy approved in the United States.
"We now have four production lines, each with an annual capacity of 40,000 to 50,000 bags," said Yin Rui, the company's chief marketing officer. A few kilometers away, a 24,000-square-meter "super factory" with 48 intelligent production lines is being built, due to start operating by the end of 2026 with a projected annual capacity of 5 million bags.
"Yizhuang coordinates industrial space and provides special support for the construction of our super factory, including land guarantees, faster approvals and a dedicated task force. The project broke ground and had its main structure topped out in the same year, which greatly shortened the industrialization cycle," Yin said.
EMPOWER ENTIRE SUPPLY CHAIN
Speed is also on show at Xiaomi's car factory in Yizhuang, which took 14 months to go from project approval to completion. At full capacity, it can turn out a vehicle every 76 seconds. More than 1,000 robots work in the plant, where key processes such as die-casting, stamping, painting and final assembly are fully automated.
Yizhuang is at the forefront of China's intelligent connected new energy vehicle industry, with innovation strength across vehicle design, manufacturing, chips, smart cockpits, and smart chassis. This gives Xiaomi a top-tier platform and intellectual support for technological innovation.
In return, suppliers have grown alongside the carmaker. Beijing Hainachuan Automotive Parts Co., Ltd., a Yizhuang-based auto parts maker and Xiaomi's largest single supplier in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, had added nearly 14 billion yuan in output value across its upstream and downstream operations there thanks to Xiaomi's demand, its chairman, Li Jingang, said last November.
Also in Yizhuang, Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics Co., Ltd. formally launched a pilot-scale verification platform in January 2026, with a demonstration line for whole-robot production, a robot-joint production line and a small-batch trial line. It is open to companies, universities and research institutes, offering one-stop services from prototyping and process verification to assembly and testing.
"The platform will give a strong boost to the high-quality development of China's humanoid robotics industry," said Li Chunzhi, COO of the company.
POLICY SUPPORT
Sustained policy backing underpins the fast growth of these companies. In the past five years, Yizhuang has issued nearly 70 policies supporting strategic emerging and future industries and set aside more than 10 billion yuan in industrial development funds each year, said Kong Lei, secretary of the area's Party working committee.
In July, the area launched an instant-subsidy platform for "model vouchers," which help companies pay for AI model services. In June, Yizhuang's local state-owned investment firms launched four industrial investment funds totaling 20 billion yuan, covering AI and integrated circuits, biotechnology and health, intelligent manufacturing and robotics, and future industries.
Over the next five years, Yizhuang will focus on next-generation intelligent manufacturing, Kong said. It will strengthen its leading industries such as integrated circuits, medicine and health, and intelligent connected vehicles, and develop future industries such as quantum information, biomanufacturing, brain-computer interfaces, and superconducting materials. By 2030, it aims to have eight industrial clusters worth more than 100 billion yuan each, with total industrial output value reaching 1 trillion yuan.
Kong said the area will also raise the share of investment in basic research and open up application scenarios across the area, focusing on autonomous driving, robotics, aerospace technology, advanced energy and urban governance, to help move frontier technologies from laboratories into real-world use.
Beyond Yizhuang, another part of Beijing is also drawing companies in growing numbers. In Tongzhou District, home to Beijing's municipal administrative center, the canal business district has attracted more than 20,000 registered companies. In the first half of 2026, it added 2,281 companies. Financial institutions, national high-tech enterprises, and firms that use specialized and sophisticated technologies to produce novel and unique products are increasingly gathering there.
In Beijing, the distance between a laboratory bench and a production line has been compressed to a few kilometers. Technology, capital, land, talent, policy support and suppliers sit close enough to develop in step with one another -- that is what allows scientific discovery and industrial application to advance as a single process. ■
