The city of Baotou – located in North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region – recently allocated 106 million yuan ($16.17 million) in its budget in the current year to boost its development as a digital society.

Overall, the city is moving to roll out support policies, as well as funding, to achieve that goal.

Of the total funding, a smart city construction fund has allocated 24.77 million yuan, a government informatization construction and business environment capacity improvement fund is getting 20 million yuan and a cloud computing development fund is to receive 10 million yuan.

Among other recipients, a traffic management informatization fund is to get 20 million yuan, a medical and health security fund will have 6.3 million yuan, while work on the development of big data monitoring gets 10 million yuan and the build-out of the government's digital governance capacity is to receive 15.41 million yuan.

All this funding is with the aim of broadly and intensively promoting the digital transformation and development of the city.

Moving forwards, the Baotou bureau of finance will move to allocate special funds for the high-quality development of industrial parks, the repurposing of old industrial bases and the high-quality development of its manufacturing industries.

It will also extensively boost its financial security capabilities for digital development in such areas as cloud computing, data chains and cloud service procurements.

At the same time, the bureau will further improve a diversified investment mechanism for the government, society and business and guide social capital to support the construction of a digital society.