Nearly half of those attending the 2024 ZGC Forum's opening ceremony and plenary session are foreign nationals.

The 2024 Zhongguancun Forum, recently held in Beijing, presented a global technological gala, attracting a great number of participants from China and abroad.

With the theme of "Innovating for a Better World", the ZGC Forum, as it is known, ran from April 25 to 29 and comprised 128 events, including forums and conferences, technology exchanges, technological achievement releases and technology competitions, as well as a series of supporting events such as exhibitions, science popularization and a tech carnival.

More than 120 global top scientists and academies from home and overseas delivered speeches at the 2024 ZGC Forum Annual Conference Plenary Session and 60 parallel forums, sharing their insights into frontier technologies and related industries.

Of the speakers, more than 30 percent were from overseas, including over 10 Nobel Prize, Fields Medal, and Turing Award winners.

Yu Yingjie, a member of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China Beijing Municipal Committee, noted the annual forum's expanding international influence.

Nearly half of those attending the forum's opening ceremony and plenary session were foreign nationals, setting a new record compared to previous years. Of them, more than 300 traveled from abroad to attend the event.

Nineteen international organizations, including UNESCO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and the International Association of Science Parks and Areas of Innovation, as well as foreign government departments, organized 17 parallel forums. And nearly 600 speakers at the parallel forums, or 48 percent, were from overseas.

Among those in attendance were representatives from 218 foreign government departments and international organizations, and 162 domestic and international universities as well as participants from across the country.

The business community in particular showed keen interest in getting involved, with executives of 225 venture capital institutions, more than 100 unicorn companies, and over 10,000 tech businesses participating.

The 2024 Zhongguancun International Advanced Technology Competition, a key part of the forum, received 1,280 projects from 74 overseas countries and regions, accounting for more than 40 percent of the total number of entries.

During the 2024 Zhongguancun International Technology Trade Fair, technology matchmaking sessions designed for cooperation with multiple countries such as the United Kingdom, Italy, South Korea and Japan were lined up.

As a result, a group of key international cooperation projects, including a sci-tech cooperation platform between Zhongguancun Science City and the Malaysian Research Accelerator for Technology & Innovation, which is Malaysia's central research and innovation commercialization agency that accelerates ideas to market, were signed, burnishing the brand of the fair as a global technology trading event.

In total, 309 cooperation projects were signed during this year's ZGC Forum, with a combined contract value of 67.32 billion yuan ($9.30 billion).

Meanwhile, a wide range of latest technological innovations were showcased and a batch of policy incentives and heavyweight industry reports were also released at the 2024 ZGC Forum.

Especially in the field of artificial intelligence, diverse dialogues were conducted around hot topics such as model architecture innovation, AI ethics and safety, and embodied intelligence to enhance visionary research and assessment.

In the field of life sciences, significant cutting-edge technological achievements were announced, focusing on areas such as brain-machine interfaces and synthetic biomanufacturing, including a high-performance invasive intelligent brain-machine system and highly resilient and highly expressive red ball bacterium chassis cells.

In-depth discussions were held in space science too, focusing on the extreme cosmos, ripples in space-time, and other areas, and the latest technological achievements like the Zhuque-2 carrier rocket were also released. Notably, the first in-orbit images captured by China's Einstein Probe astronomical satellite, which was sent into space in January, garnered global attention.

In addition, a series of high-level research reports were released on technology focus, trends in Earth science research, and the Chinese science fiction industry, among other things "of significant importance for grasping global trends at the forefront of science and technology".

During the forum, the Beijing authorities awarded more than 50 foreign-funded research and development centers to support foreign-invested businesses' development in the city. Also, nearly 100 research reports, standards and regulations, rankings, indexes and proposals were released, according to the organizers.