Ministries: Guide on industrial development along the Yangtze River Economic Belt

According to the guidelines released by five ministries in June 2017, five city clusters will form an axis of industrial development along the Yangtze River Economic Belt.

They will be located in the Yangtze River Delta region, the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, the Chengdu-Chongqing area, central Guizhou province and central Yunnan province.

Core cities, including Shanghai, Wuhan and Chongqing, will support node cities such as Nanjing, Wuhu, Jiujiang, Huangshi, Yueyang and Wanzhou in promoting industrial development in a green and sustainable way.

Resource-intensive, labor-intensive and domestic market-oriented tech-intensive industries will gradually be transferred into the middle and upper reaches. The guidelines defined clearly the roles of different reaches.

The lower reach areas should focus on innovating modern services, advanced manufacturing and strategic emerging industries, in order to build a modern industrial system driven by the service economy and pillared by smart manufacturing.

Cities along the middle reaches should accelerate the upgrading of industry clusters, restructure the development of the service industry, establish advanced manufacturing bases and forge an industrial system with regional characteristics.

The upper reach cities should focus on green development and competitive industries. They should undertake targeted industry transfer from both home and abroad to realize integrated and coordinated cluster development.

The above city clusters are the strategic cores of the Yangtze River Economic Belt as they account for about 45 percent of the belt's land area, 73 percent of its population and 83 percent of its economy, according to Fang Chuanglin, director of the Research Center for Regional and Urban Planning at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The guidelines were jointly released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Environmental Protection (now reformed as the Ministry of Ecology and Environment).

Source: Economic Information Daily