🌊🎉 Celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB)! Since a high-level symposium in January 2016 in Chongqing crowned the YREB as a core national strategy, this mega corridor has fueled the Chinese mainland's shift toward high-quality growth.
Stretching across 11 provincial-level regions and home to over 40% of China's people and economic output, the YREB has made coordinated development, ecological protection, and innovation its trademarks. As we step into the 15th Five-Year Plan period, the focus has moved from growing fast to growing smart and green.
🔬 Tech Innovation Takes Center Stage
From the Yangtze River Delta to the Wuhan metro area and the Chengdu-Chongqing economic zone, China's most dynamic innovation clusters are booming. The next challenge? Weaving them into one powerful network. That means boosting cross-regional research, making it easier for scientific talent to move around, and aligning industrial policies so we avoid overlaps and spark real breakthroughs in advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and new materials.
🌱 Green Growth as a Competitive Edge
Ecological protection has been in the YREB's DNA from day one. Over the past decade, joint efforts in pollution control, ecological restoration, and energy efficiency have shown that green and growth go hand in hand. Now, green development is set to become a superpower: low-carbon industries, more renewables, and green finance will drive the region's sustainability agenda. Old-school sectors like steel, chemicals, and shipping are getting a clean-tech makeover, while new green industries are creating jobs and fresh opportunities.
By strengthening links between universities, research institutes, and businesses, the YREB is turning lab successes into real-world gains. This is how the region can anchor the Chinese mainland in higher rungs of global value chains and light the way for China's next growth story.
Keep your eyes on the Yangtze: the next ten years could be the most exciting chapter yet! 🚀
Reference(s):
Yangtze River Economic Belt at 10: Unlocking new growth engines
cgtn.com
