Text | Bai Jiajia
In 1925, Zhu Ziqing, a 28-year-old Tsinghua University teacher, wrote an article called "Back View".
This article records the scene of father and son farewell at the Pukou Railway Station in Nanjing. It was later compiled into different versions of textbooks and became a common memory of several generations.
Pukou Railway Station has witnessed many important historical moments and is known as "condensing half of the modern history of China."
In modern times, time has not worn away its value, but has made it more and more heavy.
In 2015, it was classified as the thirteenth national-level new district in Jiangsu Province, Jiangbei New District.
Every city needs a coordinate that carries the soul. For Jiangbei New District, a young national-level new district, Pukou Railway Station may be the spiritual totem chosen by the state for it.
Just like Pukou Railway Station has opened a window for talent exchange and trade exchanges for China in the last century, looking back at a time of a hundred and ten years, Jiangbei New District is also continuing to write similar but more magnificent stories.
1. Talent breaks through: From "technical specialty hub" to "fertile soil for innovation"
The "Cai Gathering Gene" of Jiangbei New District has appeared a hundred years ago.
Zhu Ziqing came to Pukou Railway Station with his father in 1917 to take a bus to study at Peking University.
At that time, Pukou Railway Station was the only railway transportation station entering and leaving Nanjing. The Jinpu Railway is one of the few major railway arteries that can directly communicate with the north and south.
After aspiring people from the central and western regions came to Nanjing by boat along the Yangtze River, most of them chose this place as their transit station-Pukou Railway Station became one of the most frequent places for Chinese elites at that time.
Today's Jiangbei New District continues this tradition of "gathering talents", but it does not stop at "transit" - it also hopes to become a fertile ground for talents to take root and grow.
On the afternoon of August 26, Jiangbei New District and Nanjing University signed a strategic cooperation agreement to jointly build the Pukou Campus of Nanjing University (Jiangbei Campus).
Previously, Southeast University, Nanjing University of Aerospace, China Pharmaceutical University and other universities have deployed branches or innovation centers in Jiangbei.
Compared with the last century when it was urgently looking for advanced experience, Jiangbei New District maintained its openness while paying more attention to cultivating and tapping endogenous potential.
This may be related to its mission.
The planned area of Jiangbei New District approved by the State Council is 788 square kilometers, which is not small. However, the entire Dajiangbei area with coordinated development reached 2,451 square kilometers, comparable to the size of a prefecture-level city.
As a national-level new district that is born to shoulder the mission of "tough bones", the 2015 approval document has already set a core goal for it: "Build into a pilot zone for independent innovation." And high-tech industries are the "core crops" that need to be cultivated in this fertile land.
The "seed" of innovation originates from the rich university resources in the Yangtze River Delta, especially Nanjing.
At present, Jiangbei New District focuses on core industries such as biomedicine, integrated circuits, and intelligent manufacturing.
In the signing of Jiangbei New District and Nanyang University, the two parties agreed that they would "build the main base of the discipline of chemical medicine in Pukou Campus (Jiangbei Campus), build several new colleges and physical research institutions, and reasonably build several high-level innovation platforms in Jiangbei New District to promote the implementation and transformation of more original innovations in the new district, and jointly support the rapid development of "Nanyang University" enterprises and projects in the new district."
Through this plan, you can see the growth veins of a scientific and technological innovation forest:
With the deep integration of the "industry, education and research" chain, the scattered scientific research results are cultivated into an industrial aggregate with cluster effects.
Tracing forward, the "National College Biomedical Regional Technology Transfer and Transformation Center (Nanjing, Jiangsu)" unveiled in 2024 also accelerated the rotation of the "industry, education and research" flywheel in Jiangbei New District.
Data shows that the branch center has implemented 45 biopharmaceutical projects, of which 33 have been registered in industrial and commercial terms. It is expected that one-quarter of the projects will independently grow into biopharmaceutical companies in two years, and three-quarters will be acquired or acquired.
For the biopharmaceutical industry that is deeply trapped in the "three 10 curse" (1 billion investment, 10 years of R&D, 10% success rate), such results have exceeded the industry average.
2. Speed up the trade in goods: from "railway prosperity" to "thinking breaks"
Pukou Railway Station a hundred years ago was once a microcosm of China's trade in goods.
The beige main building extends two iconic passages: one is a single-column umbrella-shaped corridor that leads to the platform, and the other is an arched rain corridor connecting the ferry terminal.
Passengers traveling from south to north can achieve land and water transfer here, without having to hold an umbrella even on rainy days, and calmly shuttle through the "rail + water" intermodal network.
Around the station, there are all supporting facilities such as coal port, post office, hospital, school, hotel, etc.; within the station, the sound of whistles sounds one after another, and the passenger flow to Bengbu, Xuzhou, Tianjin and other places gathers here with people transiting through Huainan, Longhai and Jiaoji Railways.
They carried dried fruits, fresh goods, porcelain, jade, medicinal materials, tea from the north and south... and could find almost all the products of China at that time here.
Luxury, busy and energetic. This is the Pukou Railway Station that Zhu Ziqing entered back then, and it was also one of the largest trade distribution centers in China at that time.
Efficient railway transportation has given birth to a prosperous trade, which Chinese people have deeply understood in the past thirty years.
But for cities and regions that are eager to "go further" further, new problems have emerged:
China is already the country with the longest railway mileage in the world. How can we again improve the efficiency of goods trade on this basis?
The little mouse from Jiangbei New District may be able to give the answer:
To this day, what determines the efficiency of communication between Chinese goods and the world is no longer the speed of transportation, but the degree of openness of thinking.
Jicui Yaokang is a national high-tech enterprise in Jiangbei New District that focuses on the research and development and supply of experimental animal models and provides preclinical research CRO services.
After their gene editing and breeding, a mouse that looks ordinary can even be sold at a high price of tens of thousands of yuan.
But in the past, every mouse's exit was an "adventure":
Departing from Jiangbei New District, you must first transfer to Shanghai. After tedious customs clearance procedures, you can take a flight from several hours to more than ten hours, and then transfer to land after landing, and finally deliver it to overseas customers.
What's more difficult is that some of these mice have immune defects. Once they die, become ill or are mentally depressed during long-distance transportation, they will lose their value as experimental subjects. The company can only re-ship the goods and re-pass the process.
Not only mice, the entire biopharmaceutical industry has extremely strict requirements for transportation - efficient customs clearance and low-loss transportation directly determine the international competitiveness of the local industrial cluster.
To this end, Jiangbei New District took the lead in coordinating multiple departments to open up a "green channel" for enterprises.
By simplifying the approval process, implementing centralized supervision, and assisting customs in holding risk assessment meetings, the approval of the import process of small molecule drugs, blood and their products will be reduced from the original 20 to 30 working days to as fast as 1 to 3 working days;
In 2024, the pilot implementation of the multi-department joint supervision mechanism for special entry and exit of Jiangbei New District will be carried out, providing more convenient import and export services for biopharmaceutical enterprises in Jiangbei New District.
On June 18 last year, 54 experimental mice took flight MU579 from Nanjing Lukou Airport to Seoul, South Korea.
This is also the first time Lukou Airport has exported experimental mice in recent years.
Policy innovation quickly transforms into corporate performance growth.
Jicui Yaokang's revenue increased by 10.11% year-on-year in the first half of this year. The company clearly stated in its semi-annual report that the growth "is mainly due to the release of new domestic production capacity and the expansion of overseas markets."
According to the official account "Invest in Jiangbei", a subsidiary of the Jiangbei New District Investment Promotion and Commerce Bureau, companies such as Shihe Gene, Reindeer Biologics, WuXi AppTec, Dingtai Pharmaceutical Research have also gained the opportunity to seize the global market from convenient import and export services.
3. Blueprint implementation: From "a century-old concept" to "a drum and heavy hammer"
The land of Nanjing Jiangbei has always been highly anticipated by knowledgeable people.
Sun Yat-sen once wrote in the magazine "Construction": "Pukou on the other side of Nanjing will be the major end point for all railways north of the Yangtze River in the future."
This far-reaching thought is still out of date today.
From the location, Jiangbei New District is located at the intersection of the Yangtze River Economic Belt and the eastern coastal economic Belt, and has a vast industrial hinterland in northern Jiangsu and southern Anhui. Even in the Yangtze River Delta where there are many strong people, it is probably not that easy to find a second area with both these two advantages.
In terms of radiation area, its spillover effect on northern Jiangsu and southern Anhui alone can cover about 53,000 square kilometers of land, radiating permanent population exceeds 20 million, which is equivalent to the total population of Shanghai.
Perhaps it can be said that the construction of Jiangbei New District was exactly the "big plan" that Sun Yat-sen was thinking about a hundred years ago.
But the drum still needs to be hit hard, and the "big plan" is often accompanied by "high threshold".
This is exactly the biggest challenge facing Jiangbei New District:
To build this national-level new district that points to the future, the past accumulation alone is far from enough. Talents, policies, hardware facilities, capital investment... every item needs to be planned with a forward-looking perspective.
A detail written in history is: the "big road" in front of Pukou Railway Station in the past is just a path with three cars running in parallel.
At present, Jiangbei New District is preparing three aces.
The first is to improve regional energy levels by building a hub.
In September last year, Jiangbei New District started construction of Nanjing North Station about 9 kilometers north of Pukou Railway Station.
This station is a truly super hub. After completion, not only will the east-west economic development axis be formed through the Shanghai-Chongqing-Chengdu High-speed Railway, but it will also further strengthen the connection with northern Jiangsu and northern Anhui regions.
Today, when the integration of the Yangtze River Delta has been elevated to a national strategy, the completion of Nanjing North Station will make Jiangbei New District an important fulcrum to support this strategy.
It is precisely for this reason that national senior management attaches great importance to the construction of Nanjing North Station. When they came to Jiangsu for investigation in June this year, they made a special trip to Nanjing North Station and left their expectations: "We must control every link according to the requirements of a century-old plan."
The second is the industrial layout with a high position.
Take the biopharmaceutical industry as an example.
The biopharmaceutical industry in Jiangbei New District has never been just to serve the development goals of a city and a province.
On August 27, the Ministry of Commerce and the Jiangsu Provincial Government issued the "China (Jiangsu) Free Trade Pilot Zone Biomedical Industry Chain Open Innovation Development Plan", which clearly mentioned that "support the acceleration of the construction of the national sub-center for biomedical technology transfer and transformation of universities (Jiangsu) to promote the transformation of biomedical scientific and technological achievements in universities."
Two days later, Jiangsu Governor Xu Kunlin and Nanjing Municipal Party Committee Secretary Zhou Hongbo came to Jiangbei to investigate the development of the biopharmaceutical industry.
During the investigation, Xu Kunlin emphasized that (Jiangbei New District needs to) "better contribute to the high-quality development of strategic emerging industries such as biomedicine in the country."
The third is an interlocking support policy.
From the country to the province and then to the city, governments at all levels have long implemented support for the Jiangbei New District into documents.
After Jiangsu issued the "Opinions on Supporting the High-Quality Construction of Nanjing Jiangbei New District" in January last year, Nanjing also released the "2025 Nanjing Municipal Government Work Report" in the same month, making the "issuance of municipal-level support policies to Jiangbei New District, and delegate power and empower the new district with greater efforts."
This "greater strength" weight is clearly defined in the "Nanjing Land and Space Master Plan (2021-2035)" approved by the state: the new main city in Jiangbei is positioned as a "central urban area".
In a nutshell, in order to make "New Nanjing" play a more important role in the economic map of the Yangtze River Delta, Nanjing may spare no effort in supporting Jiangbei New District.
From hub to industry, from policy to positioning, the development potential of Jiangbei New District can be seen and accumulated continuously.
Someone asked anxiously: When will Jiangbei New District prosper like Jiangnan?
No one can give an accurate answer, but heavy things never happen overnight. Only by slowly accumulating energy can it burst out with tremendous energy when accelerating.
Humans have understood this rule from Mercedes-Benz trains. The Jiangbei New District, which draws spiritual strength from Pukou Railway Station, is spraying out the first ray of steam.
