Shan Chongxin, a national political adviser and vice-president of Zhengzhou University, has underscored the critical need for the integrated development of education, science and technology, and talent to bolster the nation's high-level self-reliance in technological strength.

Shan, a renowned expert in ultra-hard materials and a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference who has long worked on the front lines of new materials research, said he will leverage his dual background as a scientist and educator to offer proposals at this year's two sessions.

His focus areas include promoting the commercialization of scientific achievements in universities, better aligning higher education with societal needs for talent cultivation, and improving science outreach in remote areas.

"Education, science and technology, and talent form the fundamental and strategic support for comprehensively building a modern socialist country. These three elements must be deployed, advanced, and evaluated together," Shan said.

He said he will write papers on the front lines of industry, transform achievements on the factory floor, and cultivate talent at the forefront of innovation, contributing to the building of a strong manufacturing country.

Shan acknowledged the nation's significant progress over six decades of development in ultra-hard materials. While China's ultra-hard materials industry now leads globally in scale and application breadth, he identified key gaps that remain.

Compared with developed countries, there is insufficient original innovation in material systems or principles; much research is still optimized within foreign technical frameworks, he said.

Second, there is an unstable high-end supply — while laboratories can produce high-performance samples, consistency, reliability, and long-term service performance in mass production still lag behind international top levels. Third, there remain barriers between materials R&D, equipment manufacturing, and downstream applications, he said.

To transition from "catching up" to "leading innovation", Shan argued that the core competition in high-end materials ultimately comes down to talent competition, which is fostered through the synergy of education and technology.

For the ultra-hard materials sector specifically, he said education must align with industry.

Second, technology must focus on pain points. With major national needs as the objective, research funding and innovation resources should be tilted toward bottleneck areas, achieving breakthroughs through industry-university-research collaboration, he said.

Third, it is important to attract, cultivate, utilize, and retain talent, creating an environment where researchers feel contentment and ease in their work, he said.

Efforts should be made to improve the incentive mechanism for commercializing research findings, allowing the value of their innovations to be fully realized and forming a virtuous cycle where education cultivates talent, talent promotes technology, and technology energizes industry, he said.

Elaborating on the role of universities in addressing national strategic needs, Shan said universities should act as both explorers of cutting-edge science and problem-solvers for major technologies, and even more importantly, as cultivators of strategic talents.

At Zhengzhou University, these principles are being actively implemented. The institution is positioning itself based on its comprehensive research university status, closely aligning with national strategic needs, regional development endowments, and technological frontiers, he said.

Looking ahead to the 2035 goal of building a strong education system, Shan positioned Zhengzhou University as serving both regional development and the national innovation system, emphasizing the university's commitment to addressing international academic frontiers, major strategic needs, and regional economic and social development.