Shenzhen's Pingshan district released a foreign-language promotional film on Tuesday about how a stretch of Hakka farmland on the city's eastern edge became one of China's densest clusters of electric-vehicle, chip, and drug manufacturers.
The film lands days before the 33rd Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders' Meeting, which Shenzhen will host from Nov 18 to 19.
The district itself is young: a factory zone was carved out of farmland here in the mid-1990s, and only in Jan 2017 did the area become a full administrative district, making it one of the newest in Shenzhen. It is home to about 800,000 residents and keeps nearly 45 percent of its land under forest. It also sits at what planners call the geographic center of the Shenzhen metropolitan area, on the innovation corridor linking Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions.
Electric-vehicle maker BYD is headquartered in Pingshan, with more than 300 component suppliers around it. District figures show it is also home to 1,300-plus biopharma and medical-device firms, more than 200 integrated-circuit companies (accounting for more than 60 percent of Shenzhen's chip-manufacturing output), and nearly 600 AI firms.
Local officials describe the mix as "vehicles, medicine, chips, intelligence"—a portfolio they say has moved from contract manufacturing toward research and product launch. R&D spending equals 11.8 percent of the local GDP, more than 98 percent of it company-funded. The number of high-level researchers and PhD holders rose 155 percent and 293 percent in the last five years, respectively.
The film spends much of its time on the district's other half: 111 parks, 15.8 square meters of park land per resident, 312 kilometers of greenways and riverside paths, and the Maluan mountain.
The Shenzhen Natural History Museum drew 910,000 visitors in its first 100 days. Planners point to a different kind of density—a 15-minute city where a library, art museum, theater, bookstore, and cinema share one block.
Dawan Shiju, a Hakka walled village built about 230 years ago, stands largely intact, and a 300-year-old Hakka enclosure nearby now houses rehearsal rooms and small stages.
Pingshan is still better known for what it makes than for how it looks. The film is a bet that the numbers—chips, forests, parks—travel further on screen than in a briefing book.
