Guangdong Province, China’s economic powerhouse, has unveiled a comprehensive strategy to accelerate its transition into a global smart manufacturing hub through the deep integration of artificial intelligence and advanced technologies. The initiative was formally announced by Huang Kunming, Provincial Party Secretary and member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, during the Guangdong Provincial High-quality Development Conference in Guangzhou on Tuesday.
The strategic vision centers on creating synergistic development between manufacturing and service sectors, leveraging the province’s substantial advantages in digital infrastructure, massive data resources, and diverse application scenarios. With a population exceeding 129 million and a regional GDP of 14.58 trillion yuan in 2025, maintaining its position as China’s top provincial economy for 37 consecutive years, Guangdong aims to achieve a GDP of approximately 25.8 trillion yuan by 2035, reaching development levels comparable to moderately developed regions.
Huang emphasized that embracing the intelligent era represents a crucial opportunity to gain future competitive advantages. “Promoting coordinated development between manufacturing and service industries is essential for harnessing technological advancement and securing strategic initiative,” he stated. This integration has already demonstrated multiplicative growth effects in both manufacturing capacity and service efficiency, significantly advancing new quality productive forces.
The provincial strategy includes cultivating multiple trillion-yuan and hundred-billion-yuan industrial clusters through scaling traditional competitive industries, strengthening emerging sectors, and fostering new industrial pillars via integrated cluster development. Major technology companies have responded enthusiastically to this vision.
Huawei Technologies Chairman Liang Hua committed to expanding research investment and addressing computing power demands through comprehensive product solutions. The company will establish an open AI ecosystem centered on its Ascend AI chip series while developing industry-specific agent platforms to support partners in enabling intelligent transformation across societal sectors.
Shein Founder Xu Yangtian demonstrated how deep manufacturing-service integration has shaped the company’s global fashion leadership. By leveraging cross-border e-commerce models and data-driven insights, Shein has created a dual competitive advantage of “speed plus precision.” The company pledged over 10 billion yuan to establish intelligent supply chain headquarters in Guangdong, collaborating to build world-class fashion industrial clusters and promote “Made with Intelligence in Guangdong” as a global benchmark.
The conference gathered more than 200 influential entrepreneurs, business representatives, and over 60 experts and scholars, signaling broad consensus for Guangdong’s intelligent industrial transformation.