High βp scenario is foreseen to be a promising candidate operational mode for steady-state tokamak fusion reactors.Dedicated experiments on EAST and data analysis find that density gradient ▽n is a control knob to improve energy confinement in high βp plasmas at low toroidal rotation as projected for a fusion reactor.Different from previously known turbulent stabilization mechanisms such as E × B shear and Shafranov shift,high density gradient can enhance the Shafranov shift stabilizing effect significantly in highβp regime,giving that a higher density gradient is readily accessible in future fusion reactors with lower collisionality.This new finding is of great importance for the next-step fusion development because it may open a new path towards even higher energy confinement in the high βp scenario.It has been demonstrated in the recent EAST experiments,i.e.,a fully non-inductive high βp (～2) H-mode plasma (H9sy2 ≥ 1.3) has been obtained for a duration over 100 current diffusion times,which sets another new world record of long-pulse high-performance tokamak plasma operation with the normalized performance approaching the ITER and CFETR regimes.