Zhongshan is located on the west bank of the Pearl River estuary in the central-south part of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region. It has a total area of 1,784 sq km and had a permanent population of 3.26 million in 2017. Among all the PRD cities on the west bank of the Pearl River, Zhongshan’s GDP and total value-added industrial output comes second only to Foshan. It has been estimated that some 800,000 of all the overseas Chinese worldwide, including the residents of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, came originally from Zhongshan.
Major Development Areas
National level: Zhongshan Torch High-Tech Industrial Development Zone
Provincial level: Zhongshan Industrial Park
Positioning
Zhongshan is a base for advanced manufacturing and modern service industries. It is also a pilot city for industrial upgrading in Guangdong Province. Key industries of the industrial cluster in Zhongshan are equipment manufacturing, household appliances, textiles and garment, electronics, lighting, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, furniture, small home appliances and hardware products, as well as emerging industries such as modern service industry and yacht industry. The port-area equipment manufacturing base hosts many large-scale state-owned enterprises, such as China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, China Railway Group Limited, China National Offshore Oil Corporation, and Sinoconst Steel Structure Co. Ltd.. The only bonded logistics centre on the west bank of the Pearl River Estuary is located in Zhongshan.
Core Competencies
Historically, there have been a number of industry sectors where Zhongshan has seemed to excel, including home appliances, garments, electronics, lightings, furniture and hardware. One consequence of this is that the city is at the heart of a fully-fledged home appliance industry chain, one that includes the production bases of several of China’s home appliance giants, including TCL and Midea. In the textile and garment sectors, Zhongshan is best known as a production centre for leisure and denim wear, with nearby Dachong known as “China’s Cowboy Clothing Town” on account of the comprehensive range of denim wear it produces. In addition to these core sectors, Zhongshan is also a key player in the electronics manufacturing and audio electronics sectors.
To the northwest of the city is Guzhen, an area known as “China’s Lighting Capital”. As a sign of its unique qualities, the town has been designated by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development as part of the first tranche of “Chinese Towns with Local Characteristics”. Moving onto the furniture sector and Dachong, a town to the southwest of Zhongshan, has long been known as both “China’s Specialist Rosewood Furniture Production Town” and “China’s Rosewood Furniture Capital”. Completing the picture, Xiaolan, a town to the northwest of the city centre, is already established as one of China’s leading hardware production bases and is now looking to add to that by establishing dedicated industrial clusters for the manufacture of locks and gas appliances.
In recent years, the focus has been on developing the high-tech enterprises active in Zhongshan. As a result, the number of such businesses has increased from 236 in 2011 to 884 in 2016. The success of this policy has seen the city top the league within Guangdong in terms of high-tech business growth over the last two years. In Zhongshan as a whole, R&D spending was 2.4% of GDP in 2016, although this is expected to rise to 2.9% by 2020. In Jan-Sep 2017, the value-added output of the city’s high-tech manufacturing sector accounts for 21% of all revenue from enterprises above a designated scale, about 6 percentage points increase compared to five years ago.
Under the terms of the city’s own 13th Five-Year Plan, the development of three new pillar industries is to be prioritized – high-end, innovative electronic information, biomedicine and semiconductor lighting. At the same time, an industrial cluster focused around the needs of the yacht manufacturing sector is also to be established. Amid all this activity, many of the city’s traditional industries are also expected to transform their operations, with quality enhancement and brand building seen as the priorities.
Looking to the agricultural sector and it is anticipated that Zhongshan will look to develop a range of new, highly cost-effective agricultural formats, including initiatives related to leisure agriculture and tourism agriculture.
Zhongshan City Enterprise Policy Navigation
- Reduce corporate tax burden
- Reduce the cost of land for enterprises
- Reduce corporate social insurance costs
- Reduce the cost of electricity used by enterprises
- Reduce corporate transportation costs
- Reduce corporate finance costs
- Reduce corporate institutional transaction costs
- Support industrial enterprises to revitalize land resources and improve utilization rate
- Supporting the cultivation of emerging pillar industries in manufacturing
- Support enterprises to carry out technological transformation