According to Qingdao Daily, to advertise the high-quality growth of the metropolis’s marine economic system, the Qingdao Marine Development Bureau has compiled the “Qingdao 15th Five-Year Marine Economic Development Plan (Draft for Comments)” (hereinafter known as the “Plan”) and is now soliciting public suggestions.
The Plan focuses on constructing a globally influential marine science and expertise innovation middle, a world-class worldwide delivery middle, a marine worldwide cooperation hub, and a contemporary marine {industry} highland. It coordinates the development of seven key duties: “forging a coordinated land-sea development pattern, accelerating high-level self-reliance in marine science and technology, strengthening and expanding the marine industry, developing a world-class marine port, expanding high-level marine opening-up, promoting harmonious and sustainable human-ocean development, and deepening comprehensive marine governance.”
The Plan proposes that in the fifteenth Five-Year Plan interval, Qingdao will coordinate the built-in growth of marine scientific and technological innovation, industrial upgrading, delivery hub development, ecological safety, and worldwide cooperation, to principally construct itself into a contemporary marine central metropolis that includes main marine science and expertise, a affluent marine economic system, clustered marine abilities, world-class port and delivery companies, a pleasing marine ecological surroundings, thriving marine tradition, and dynamic worldwide marine exchanges.
Qingdao at present has an financial mixture of 1.76 trillion yuan and is sprinting towards the “2 trillion yuan” goal. Some observers level out that such a big GDP scale implies numerous financial and social entities, which can’t be pushed solely by a single {industry}, enterprise, or group. In the period of high-quality growth, it’s much more essential to depend on new industries, new enterprise kinds, and new applied sciences to drive the leap of the metropolis’s financial quantity.
In this newly launched Plan, Qingdao has set a transparent goal: by the fifteenth Five-Year Plan interval, its gross marine product will keep a number one place nationwide, accounting for 35% of the metropolis’s complete GDP. Based on the established “2 trillion yuan” total financial purpose, this implies the marine financial mixture ought to attain 700 billion yuan — a niche of 150 billion yuan in contrast with the metropolis’s gross marine product of over 550 billion yuan achieved throughout the 14th Five-Year Plan interval.
This isn’t solely a self-imposed strain for Qingdao, but in addition stems from a way of urgency introduced by the state of affairs the place “there are benchmarks ahead and pursuers behind”. In the newest spherical of nationwide territorial spatial grasp plans permitted by the State Council, a number of cities together with Qingdao, Tianjin, Shenzhen, Dalian, Ningbo, and Xiamen have been positioned as “modern marine cities”, making a state of affairs of head-to-head competitors on the identical monitor.
In specific, Qingdao and Shenzhen are each robust coastal financial cities and sub-provincial cities, with their financial aggregates exceeding that of their respective provincial capitals. As the “main engines” of Shandong and Guangdong — two main provinces with strong marine economies — and the core hubs of the northern and southern marine financial circles respectively, the efficiency of the two cities in the marine financial discipline has lengthy drawn widespread consideration.
Statistics present that in 2020, the gross marine product of Qingdao and Shenzhen stood at 358 billion yuan and 259.64 billion yuan respectively, with Qingdao main Shenzhen by practically 100 billion yuan. No particular full-year figures for 2025 have been launched by both metropolis, however as of 2024, their gross marine merchandise have risen to 551.32 billion yuan and 540.9 billion yuan respectively. In simply 4 years, Qingdao’s forefront has shrunk sharply to solely about 10 billion yuan.
Compared with Shenzhen’s robust momentum, why has Qingdao slowed down? Previous stories have identified that Qingdao performs nicely in scientific and technological innovation supply cultivation and port exercise, however nonetheless must additional improve its city capability in areas akin to marine scientific and technological achievement transformation, maritime companies, and worldwide hub development.
In this Plan, Qingdao particularly proposes to clean the transformation and implementation of marine scientific and technological achievements, and deploy plenty of marine expertise idea verification facilities, pilot take a look at platforms, and shared service services for fundamental scientific analysis. It may even promote marine universities and analysis institutes to optimize their expertise switch programs. At the identical time, the metropolis will develop “patient capital” to construct a market-oriented enterprise capital cluster, and foster a workforce of expertise brokers in the marine sector.
In addition, to make forward-looking preparations for future industries, Qingdao has put ahead plans to deeply take part in nationwide deep-sea engineering initiatives and construct a complete deep-sea assist base. The metropolis will domesticate and develop the deep-sea exploitation {industry}, broaden and strengthen the industry-university-research alliance for deep-sea financial growth, and appeal to main enterprises and upstream and downstream gamers in the industrial chain to arrange deep-sea companies in Qingdao.
This article is from the WeChat official account “City Evolution Theory”, written by Yang Huan, and revealed with authorization from 36Kr.