Guangdong Advances GBA Construction, Fostering New Drivers for Open Cooperation

In the first year of the "15th Five-Year Plan", the State Council Information Office organized a series of themed interviews to help Chinese and foreign journalists understand how various regions implement the outline of the "15th Five-Year Plan". On April 15th, relevant personages from the People’s Government of Guangdong Province introduced the progress in continuously promoting the construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) and accelerating the cultivation of new drivers for open cooperation and new advantages in international competition.

According to People’s Daily Online, Zhang Hu, Member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Guangdong Provincial Committee and Executive Vice Governor of Guangdong Province, introduced that in 2025, the GBA, with less than 0.6% of China’s land area and about 6% of its permanent population, created 1/9 of the country’s total economic output, achieving a regional GDP of about 2.15 trillion US dollars. In recent years, Guangdong has worked hand in hand with Hong Kong and Macao to build the GBA into a power source for China’s high-quality development and a highland for high-level opening-up.

Data shows that from January to February this year, the growth rates of Guangdong’s main economic indicators were better than those of the whole year last year. The added value of industrial enterprises above designated size increased by 7.9%, and profits rose by more than 20%. Retail sales of consumer goods grew by 4.6%, while fixed asset investment increased by 0.9%. Foreign trade maintained double-digit growth, with imports and exports rising by 22.1% and cross-border e-commerce exports surging nearly 60%.

Zhang Jinsong, Director of Guangdong Provincial Department of Commerce, said in an interview, "We have launched a number of reform and innovation measures to continuously polish the ‘golden signboard’ of the Canton Fair." According to People’s Daily Online, the Canton Fair has become an important platform for Guangdong to expand opening-up and promote foreign trade.

Zeng Jinze, Director of Guangdong Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology, noted that as a major manufacturing province, Guangdong has laid out a number of robot industry clusters. "Leading robot enterprises such as UBTech, RoboSense and Yuejiang Technology have emerged in Shenzhen’s 10-kilometer-long Robot Valley," he said, adding that Guangdong will support key core technology research in the robot industry and expand application scenarios.

Gong Zhenzhi, Director of Guangdong Provincial Development and Reform Commission, introduced measures to promote the development of emerging and future industries in the GBA. "We will lead the industrial transformation towards high-end, intelligent and green development, and support Pearl River Delta cities to find their industrial positioning based on local conditions," he said, emphasizing that Guangdong will rely on reform, opening-up and innovation to enhance vitality.

To address the imbalance in regional development, Zhang Hu stated that Guangdong is thoroughly implementing the "Hundred Counties, Thousand Towns and Ten Thousand Villages High-Quality Development Project", taking counties as the starting point to promote balanced urban and rural development. According to People’s Daily Online, the project has achieved initial results in three years, with 57 counties (cities) seeing faster GDP growth than the provincial average in the past three years.