Yangling: Where Israeli Innovation Meets Chinese Ambition

Trek to Yangling, out in China’s Shaanxi Province, and see the reach of the start-up nation. There, 50 miles west of the city of Xi’an—famed for its Terracotta Army—is a Chinese-style gate just off the road, its Hebrew lettering just below the Chinese characters: “Israeli-Chinese Agricultural Technology Cooperation Park.”

Through the gate is a demonstration of Israeli agriculture technology put to use in China. The start attraction is a device—from the Israeli company Mottech—that uses automation to calibrate the filtering of water and channeling of fertilizer into the soil. Throughout the park, Chinese and Israeli flags fly side by side.

The cooperation zone is only a small part of the wide-ranging relations between Israel and China. Two countries that established diplomatic relations only in 1992, and whose trade has grown 2,800%: from $50 million in 1992 to $14 billion in 2018.

For officials at the Yangling Agricultural Hi-Tech Industries Demonstration Zone—China’s leading agritech innovation center—the small Israeli-Chinese cooperation park is only the beginning of what they want. On a recent visit by a delegation of Israeli journalists and government spokespersons, officials at the Yangling high-tech zone lobbied for much more.

The officials talked up sister-city deals, an increase in the number of visiting Israeli scholars, and—most of all—a dedicated facility in Israel where rotating groups of Chinese specialists would come to study with Israeli researchers about Israeli technology. Yangling’s executives are eager to write the checks.

“We can provide the funding,” a Yangling official said while giving the delegation a tour of the Yangling zone, “Israel should just provide the curriculum.”

The Yangling cooperation pitch fits in with China’s push to become an across-the-board superpower. 

A country equipped with the best technology in all key fields, which can innovate and then deploy technology both for its own needs and as a Chinese-sponsored export to build soft power abroad. And so, at Yangling, a hall holds more than sixty flags, all of developing countries that have sent students to study agritech and bring the lessons home.

Showing how Yangling’s Chinese-Hebrew gate emblemizes a country that admires the start-up nation so much that it wants to become a start-up nation of its own.

Owen Alterman is the Senior International Affairs Correspondent of the i24NEWS English channel. He participated in the delegation as a guest of the Chinese government.