About Lujiang Innovation Laboratory

Lujiang Innovation Laboratory

Lujiang Innovation Laboratory is the Fujian Marine Science and Technology Innovation Laboratory, Xiamen's newest provincial innovation laboratory. Invest Xiamen, the municipal investment-promotion authority, records that the laboratory was approved for construction in October 2024 and that its founding conference, together with a seminar on the integration of marine science and industrial innovation, was held in Xiamen on 19 January in the 2025 reporting cycle. It is jointly established by Xiamen University, the Third Institute of Oceanography of the Ministry of Natural Resources, and leading national marine technology enterprises and research institutions, and it is the marine member of Fujian's provincial innovation-laboratory family.

Approval and Founding

The laboratory's path to founding ran through a formal feasibility process. In June 2022, Fujian provincial reporting recorded that the Provincial Department of Science and Technology had convened an expert panel to discuss the feasibility of constructing the Fujian Provincial Marine Innovation Laboratory. The application was led by the Municipal Government of Xiamen, with Xiamen University and the Third Institute of Oceanography of the Ministry of Natural Resources as the supporting institutions, and the panel fully recognised the imperative and urgency of establishing the laboratory and held its construction plan to be fundamentally feasible. Approval for construction followed in October 2024. On 19 January, at the founding conference in Xiamen, the Fujian Marine Science and Technology Innovation Laboratory — Lujiang Innovation Laboratory — was formally established, with strategic cooperation and project signing agreements concluded at its unveiling ceremony.

Joint Builders

The laboratory's two academic and scientific pillars are the strongest marine research institutions in Fujian. Xiamen University has one of China's leading ocean-science programmes, centred on its College of Ocean and Earth Sciences and the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, and is consistently among the country's most productive marine research universities in the Nature Index. The Third Institute of Oceanography, under the Ministry of Natural Resources, is the national oceanographic institute seated in Xiamen, with its own deep record in marine environment, resources and technology. Around these two, the laboratory is jointly established with leading marine technology enterprises and research institutions nationwide, following the mixed university–institute–enterprise construction model used across Fujian's laboratory system. The Xiamen municipal government led the original application, giving the laboratory a direct line into the city's marine industrial planning.

Five Research Fields

Invest Xiamen's founding report states that the laboratory will focus on breakthroughs and industrialisation in core and critical technologies in five areas: marine environmental safety, marine biomedicine, high-end marine equipment, the marine seed industry, and blue foods. Each field maps onto a Fujian strength or need. Marine environmental safety addresses monitoring, forecasting and ecological protection for a long and heavily used coastline. Marine biomedicine develops drugs and bio-products from marine organisms, a field in which Xiamen already hosts a growing industrial cluster. High-end marine equipment covers the instruments, vessels and engineering systems of the ocean economy. The marine seed industry — the breeding of improved marine aquaculture stock — and blue foods together address Fujian's position as one of China's great aquaculture and fisheries provinces, where the science of seed and feed decides the industry's future.

Alignment with the National Marine System

The founding report records two alignments that define the laboratory's strategic position. It will support the establishment of the Laoshan National Laboratory's Fujian Research Institute — Laoshan Laboratory in Qingdao being China's national laboratory for marine science and technology, restructured from the Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology — and it will align with Fujian's provincial and municipal modern industrial systems. In effect, Lujiang is designed as the provincial tier of a two-tier marine research structure in Fujian: the national laboratory's Fujian presence above it, and the province's marine industries below it, with Lujiang converting between the two. That is the same bridging role Fujian's other provincial laboratories play in their fields, applied to the sea.

Why Fujian, Why Xiamen

Fujian's case for a marine laboratory, as stated in the province's 2022 feasibility reporting, is that Fujian is a major province in marine resources and marine economy, enjoys a solid foundation in marine scientific research, and holds competitive marine research resources in Xiamen University and the Third Institute of Oceanography — and that the Provincial Party Committee and Provincial Government attach great importance to building a "marine powerhouse" province. Xiamen's role is defined nationally as well as provincially: the city is building a national marine economy demonstration zone that balances marine resource utilisation with ecological protection, and its Marine High-Tech Industrial Park in Xiang'an — the only marine-oriented high-tech industrial park in Fujian, and a provincial-level ocean high-tech zone — began construction of its Marine Innovation Industrial Park (Phase I) in November 2024, with some 212,000 square metres of facilities and about 1 billion yuan of investment primarily for marine biomedicine, high-end marine equipment and new materials. The laboratory's five fields and the park's three priority industries are near-mirror images: the laboratory is the research apex of the industrial build-out the city had already begun.

Place in Fujian's Laboratory Family

Lujiang Innovation Laboratory joins a provincial innovation-laboratory family that began with four laboratories in 2019 — including the Tan Kah Kee Innovation Laboratory for energy materials in Xiamen and the Mindu Innovation Laboratory for optoelectronic information in Fuzhou — and subsequently expanded with laboratories for biological products and flexible electronics, with an integrated-circuit laboratory also in preparation, in what provincial documents describe as a mission-driven, task-oriented laboratory system. Lujiang is the family's marine member and its second Xiamen laboratory, giving the city a pair of provincial platforms — energy materials and marine science — matched to its two defining research identities. Its name follows the family's geographic pattern: Lujiang, the Egret River, is the historic poetic name of Xiamen itself, the Egret Island city.

Legal and Industrial Context in Xiamen

The laboratory was founded into a city that had just legislated for its marine economy. Xiamen Special Economic Zone's Regulation on Promoting the Marine Economy took effect in March 2024, setting requirements for building a marine economy development demonstration zone, optimising the spatial layout of the marine industry, promoting sea-related industrial parks, and building a modern marine industry system. Xiamen's stated trajectory is to complete the first phase of the demonstration zone, and by 2035 to evolve into an internationally distinctive marine hub. A provincial marine laboratory, jointly built by the city's university, the national oceanographic institute in the city, and national marine enterprises, is the research instrument that trajectory requires — which is why its founding conference paired the laboratory's establishment with a seminar specifically on integrating marine science with industrial innovation, and with project signings at the unveiling itself.

Outlook

Lujiang Innovation Laboratory is, by design, a young institution: approved in October 2024 and founded in January of the following reporting cycle, its record so far is one of mandate, builders and alignment rather than results. But the elements assembled around it — two of China's strongest marine research institutions, a national-laboratory partnership, a marine industrial park under construction in the same district, a city legislating to become a maritime hub, and a province committed to marine-powerhouse status — give it one of the clearest founding briefs of any laboratory in Fujian's system. Its progress will be measured, as its sister laboratories are, in core technologies broken through and industrialised across its five fields.