Chen Junwu, an engineer with the Luoyang Petrochemical Engineering Corporation of Sinopec and a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has lived in Luoyang, Henan province, for more than 50 years. He said it is a place worth fighting for.

"I have witnessed the city's progress. In recent years, it has had so many big development opportunities, and its growth has entered the fast lane. Innovation is still an important force driving the ancient city's development today," he said.

Luoyang is renowned as one of the six ancient capitals of China. It is also one of the eight key industrial cities that took shape during the First Five-Year Plan (1953-57), when seven large State-owned enterprises were established there.

The downtown has the Jianhe River to the west, the Yellow River to the north and the Luohe and Yihe rivers to the south.

The center of Luoyang has grown from 4.5 square kilometers in the early 1950s to 265 sq km today, and the infrastructure facilities, city management and public services have improved substantially, too. Now, more than 60 percent of residents live in the urban area.

During the period of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), Luoyang's annual GDP rose to 513 billion yuan ($80 billion), and the per capita income has doubled in the past 10 years.

Innovation has been central to this 1,000-year-old former capital. From 2016 to last year, the number of Luoyang's innovation areas and platforms doubled.

The city's provincial－and ministry-level research institutes and national-level innovation platforms account for one-third of Henan's total.

Moreover, the city's labs and businesses are engaged in making China's newest aircraft carrier, large planes, spacecraft and deep-sea research submersibles.

Luoyang's industrial structure has been transformed in recent years, with innovation-driven, emerging strategic industries accounting for a large proportion.

There are 1,796 manufacturing enterprises in the city, each with annual turnover of more than 20 million yuan and employing 970,000 workers in total. Nearly 500 "made in Luoyang" products have entered the international market, and 14 of them, such as lithium batteries, hold domestic market share of more than 50 percent.