Contest projects to boost China's IT, manufacturing and biomedicine

Jacques Vervaet, a Belgian contestant, came to the competition with his big tire recycling project, hoping to find partners or producers in China, as his project website had received a large number of views from the nation.

"It's a good opportunity for me since China is a good market and it's opening (up)."

"Previous participants were almost all Chinese," said Liu Xiaoling, the rotating chairman of Federation of Chinese Professional Association in Europe.

But this year, the competition has drawn more European candidates, who regard China as a good market in terms of technological innovation.

He Ning, a project manager for German Sulfotools, said China has great support for innovation in policy and financing.

He brought two projects to the competition, and said China has become increasingly attractive to many German companies.

One of He's projects, clean peptide technology, is an eco-friendly method with lower cost for producing peptides in water. It won the first prize in the European division. Along with nine other projects, the European division selected 10 projects to go to the final.

This year, 452 projects were collected from four preliminary qualifiers: Europe, the US East coast, the US West coast, and Japan and South Korea. Some 70 projects will advance to the final contest in Harbin at the end of June.

Dai Yujun contributed to this story