Incubators, introduced to China in the late 1980s, are the kind of professional organizations providing all-round services in the legal, taxation, financing and other related fields to small and medium-sized enterprises in order to boost their healthy and rapid growth.

Beijing was one of the first Chinese cities to try such a system for developing hi-tech industries. Currently, some 980 hi- tech enterprises in the city are being supported by the incubator system, and their accumulated sales volume in the first eleven months of last year reached 2.5 billion yuan (about 300 million U. S. dollars).

A business park for students who have returned from overseas studies, located in the center of the Zhongguancun Science Park, is the incubator of the largest scale among similar parks throughout the country. So far, more than 140 returned students have settled there, engaged in 127 hi-tech projects.

Meanwhile, overseas investors have shown great interest in incubator creation, with investors from the Republic of Korea alone setting up three incubators in Beijing. Several others to be financed by the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan are now being planned.

According to a development timetable, Beijing will build up another 30 to 50 incubators, to hatch about 400 more hi-tech enterprises, within the next three years.

(Xinhua News Agency February 22, 2002)