IBLAC Members Visit Fuxing Island, Get Future View of Shanghai

Some members of the Shanghai mayor's International Business Leaders' Advisory Council visited Fuxing Island in Yangpu District on Saturday, which opened a new window for the foreign business leaders to know about the city better.

"Every year we are offered a chance to visit a place in Shanghai ahead of the IBLAC meeting, and every year we get a surprise," said Jacob Wallenberg, chairman of Investor AB, a Swedish investment firm holding shares in multinational companies, including ABB, Ericsson and AstraZeneca.

"Fuxing Island is new to me, and it is very exciting," said Wallenberg as business leaders were shown around the island to see products and services of 11 Chinese companies, including Xiaohongshu (RedNote), Bilibili, Sandriver, Raise3D and ULS Robotics, covering social media, art, manufacturing and artificial intelligence.

Fuxing Island, a man-made island built in the 1920s on the Huangpu River, was once an industrial and warehousing area, with many preserved relics such as cranes and shipyards.

Since 2024, it has been transformed into a "quantum city" pilot zone and an international innovation cluster. It has hosted many trendy events, with the most recent one being the recent REDLAND during the weeklong National Day holiday, attracting more than 200,000 visitors.

"All these popular events have made Fuxing Island well-known to the public. But it has a bigger role to play in the era of artificial intelligence, that is, it will become a test ground for the application of humanoid intelligence, dedicated to technological innovations and their commercialization," said Shen Lu, an architecture designer and chief planner of the island.

The Fuxing Island foray paves the way for the IBLAC meeting tomorrow, the 38th edition of the event, which has grown into a think tank of sorts, focusing on the best ways to shape Shanghai's future.

The theme of this year's meeting is "Fostering Innovation-driven Development of Shanghai's Service Sector."