High β p 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 β p 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 high β p 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 β p scenario. It has been demonstrated in the recent EAST experiments, i.e., a fully non-inductive high β p (∼2) H-mode plasma (H 98y2 ≥ 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.