Yadea – the world’s leading electric two-wheeler brand for eight consecutive years – runs a plant in its home base of Wuxi, in east China’s Jiangsu province, where a single assembly line can produce 1,300 electric bicycles and scooters a day, offering visitors a glimpse of the country’s manufacturing prowess.As of last year, Hong Kong-listed Yadea had sold over 100 million electric two-wheelers in more than 100 countries. It exemplifies how Chinese manufacturers are leveraging automation to streamline and speed up once labour-intensive assembly processes – a strategy that has enabled them to capture international markets with high-quality, competitively priced products.

Those firms were the focus of a whistle-stop tour in August sponsored by the Jiangsu government, in which participants visited companies in the fields of manufacturing, robotics, healthcare, artificial intelligence and new energy that demonstrated the province’s technological advances and innovations.

It reflected the manufacturing success of Jiangsu, which has a population of 85 million, a territory slightly larger than South Korea’s and a per capita gross domestic product of US$22,500 last year.

Despite the rise of China’s internet economy in the past two decades, Jiangsu, one of the country’s most developed regions, has not produced tech giants on the scale of Huawei Technologies, Tencent Holdings or Alibaba Group Holding.

But as Beijing declared that its innovation drive had entered “deep waters”, with easy gains behind and tougher challenges ahead, a growing number of advanced manufacturers across Jiangsu is beginning to attract more attention.