Aerial photo taken on June 21, 2018 shows morning view of the Lujiazui area in Pudong of Shanghai, east China.Photo:Xinhua

Shanghai vows to enhance its position as an international financial center and further promote technological innovation in the next five years amid China's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) period.

The city, which announced to have basically built itself into an international financial center by 2020, aims to further improve its international financial influence with a total transaction volume on financial markets expected to reach 2,800 trillion yuan ($435.7 trillion) by 2025, according to Shanghai's proposals for the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) for the city's economic and social development and its long-term vision through to 2035, which were officially released on Saturday after being approved by local legislators.

Shanghai will try to attract more global industry giants to settle, planning to increase the number of regional headquarters of multinational companies to more than 1,000 by 2035 from the current 771. 

The city's Lingang area, a newly launched section of the Shanghai free trade zone, is expected to create GDP growth quadrupling that of 2018, according to the proposals.

To improve its function as an international trade hub, Shanghai has also scheduled to construct a distribution center of import and export commodities that connects Shanghai's surrounding Yangtze River Delta, serving the country and even the Asia-Pacific region.

The city is determined to strengthen the financial sector to improve the real economy. It plans to establish an RMB financial asset allocation and risk management center in the next five years, and improve its financial market monitoring level through setting up a China financial market trading database locally.

Scientific and technological innovation is a powerful engine that drives [city] development, the proposals said. Shanghai's expenditure on research and development (R&D) is expected to account for 4.5 percent of the city's GDP by 2025, rising from 4.1 percent in 2020.

Shanghai vows to establish itself into a fintech hub with global competitiveness. It will set up a national research center for fintech development, and accelerate the R&D process in core fintech fields including big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing and 5G.

Meanwhile, the city will emphasize the protection of financial information security and build an ever-improving mechanism of fintech risk prevention.

As one of China's most striking economic engines, Shanghai is now at a critical stage of development under the complex international situation, said Chinese economic scholars reached by the Global Times, who praise the great importance that Shanghai has for finance and technology.

The two sectors will be major contributors to the role that Shanghai plays in promoting the beneficial development of China's "dual circulation" strategy, which takes the domestic market as the mainstay and allows domestic and foreign markets to boost each other, said Sun Lijian, director of the Financial Research Center at Fudan University in Shanghai.

"Unlike many other international financial centers that mainly depend on the foreign market, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, Shanghai is expected to do more in boosting the domestic real economy and consumption," Sun told the Global Times on Saturday.