Published on : 23/04/2024
Apart from well-known cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Zhuhai which is adjacent to Macao, also has intriguing stories during the period of Reform and Opening-up in China.
The road to Reform and Opening-up in Zhuhai was not easy. This small fishing village underwent a tortuous journey to achieve its current development situation with a GDP exceeding 400 billion CNY.
As once a small village, Zhuhai sought to take off with tourism
Zhuhai Special Economic Zone was officially established in 1980. At that time, Zhuhai had a permanent population of less than 370,000, and the economy was mainly based on traditional agriculture and fishing.
"A grain station, a hotel, a road, a traffic light" was almost all the memory of the older generation of Zhuhai about the city.
In order to rapidly catch up with the world, Zhuhai initially chose to focus on tourism, proposing to "build a base for the production of export commodities with a combination of industry and agriculture at a considerable level, become a tourist area attracting Hong Kong and Macao visitors, and a new border city".
In the following years, Zhuhai's tourism industry started from scratch and entered its first period of rapid development.
However, at that time, China had just started the Reform and Opening-up, and for most Chinese people who were just beginning to relieve food and clothing problems and were striving to become "prosperous", tourism was still too luxurious.
It was inevitably a bit "ahead of the curve" for Zhuhai to choose tourism as the leading industry to drive the development of other industries.
Zhuhai realised that what could really bring Zhuhai onto the path of prosperity was industrial manufacturing.
For this reason, Zhuhai quickly adjusted its city positioning and proposed a policy to build a "seaside industrial and commercial city, based on industry, with the simultaneous operation of agriculture, fishing and animal husbandry, tourism, and commerce, comprehensive development".
It also formulated the ideas for industrial development which were to "combine external introduction with internal connection, with the external introduction as the main body".
Zhuhai's first transformation focused on high-tech
By the 1990s, when the cities of the Pearl River Delta achieved economic takeoff by introducing traditional manufacturing one after another, Zhuhai proposed a new position of "garden-style coastal industrial and commercial city or high-tech city", hoping to develop high value-added, high-tech, and low-pollution high-tech industries, which was a different development path from other cities.
Unfortunately, in the mid-1990s, faced with many cities in the country rushing to roll out science and technology reward plans, Zhuhai's "talent attracting" policy lost its lustre in the fierce competition.
It gave up the traditional manufacturing industry of "three supplies and one compensation" too early, resulting in a smaller industrial scale, a weak economic structure, and a general weakening of industrial competitiveness.
Although talent were successfully attracted there, they still struggled to find a suitable development environment and eventually moved out.
During this period, Zhuhai undoubtedly achieved some success and laid the initial foundation in the development of high-tech industries, but it was not effective enough. Not only did the gap with Shenzhen widen, but it was also overtaken by cities like Dongguan, Foshan, and Zhongshan.
Reform&Opening-up｜Zhuhai finally completed the big transformation
Entering the 21st century, Zhuhai has established a new city positioning of "three bases and one centre", which is to build an information technology-led high-tech industrial base, a productive academic and research base with strong attraction, an export earning base for high value-added products, and to become a modern regional centre city with strong attraction, beautiful environment, economic prosperity, and good order.
Subsequently, Zhuhai again puts forward the strategy of "Industrial Westward Expansion and Urban Westward Expansion", aiming to change the unbalanced situation of the overall economic pattern.
In 2003, Zhuhai made a breakthrough in industrialisation with the city's total industrial output value exceeding the first 100 billion CNY mark.
Since then, Zhuhai's industrial development has entered the "fast lane", breaking through the second 100 billion CNY in 2007 and the third 100 billion CNY in 2010.
By 2021, Zhuhai achieved a total industrial output value of over 520 billion CNY, exceeding the fifth 100 billion CNY mark.
More than 40 years later, Zhuhai has transformed from a poor fishing village into a coastal city with high-rise buildings, picturesque views, and dazzling lights.
