Reform, opening up and innovation: Unpacking Shenzhen's success story

Editor's Note: Xin Ge, a special commentator for CGTN, is a professor at the School of Public Administration and Policy, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. This article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of CGTN.

As the host of APEC in 2026, China will hold the 33rd APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in Shenzhen this November. It will be the third time a Chinese city has hosted the meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, after Shanghai in 2001 and Beijing in 2014, but for the first time the honor falls on a special economic zone (SEZ).

The choice is no coincidence. Should you wish to show the APEC member economies what reform, opening up and innovation can achieve within a single generation, there is no better stage than a city that was a border town of just over 30,000 residents in 1980 and is now a metropolis of 18.25 million.

Six years ago, on October 14, 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the gathering celebrating the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Shenzhen SEZ with six requirements for its next chapter: apply the new development philosophy unswervingly; deepen reform across the board; open wider on all fronts; modernize urban governance; put people at the center; and advance the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

Read retrospectively, those six points map neatly onto the three questions any visitor to APEC 2026 will ask: How does Shenzhen keep reforming? How does it stay open? And where does its innovative energy come from?

Let's start with reform. Shenzhen's answer has been to treat reform as an operating system rather than a slogan. In 2020, the central government entrusted the city with a pioneering comprehensive pilot reform mandate – 27 reform measures and an initial batch of 40 authorized matters, authorizing experimentation in domains from market-based factor allocation to business-environment regulation.

The results show up in the ledger: by the end of 2025, Shenzhen counted 4.65 million registered business entities, equating to roughly one for every four residents.

Moreover, reform also extends to the governance of this megacity: the city has turned its own digital prowess inward, making administration measurably smarter, while channeling resources into job creation, education, health care and housing. The point of it all is simple enough: growth that people can actually feel.

On openness, Shenzhen has moved from opening its doors to opening its rules like aligning regulations, standards and market access provisions that economists term institutional opening.

The Qianhai cooperation zone pilots modern services in tandem with the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, where Hong Kong-qualified lawyers, architects and engineers can now practice after a simple registration rather than a full re-examination.

The Hetao zone links Shenzhen's laboratories with Hong Kong's universities inside a jointly governed science park. And the Greater Bay Area stitches nine mainland cities together with Hong Kong and Macao into an integrated market of some 86 million residents. The World Intellectual Property Organization took note last year, ranking Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou first among the world's top 100 innovation clusters, ahead of Tokyo-Yokohama of Japan.

The statistics bear this out. Shenzhen's foreign trade reached 4.55 trillion yuan (approximately $680 billion) in 2025, and its exports have ranked first among mainland cities for 33 consecutive years.

That APEC has landed here, in the Chinese mainland's pioneering window to the world, constitutes an answer sheet on openness, drafted not in communiques but in container throughput, cross-border commuters and joint laboratories.

Finally, innovation, the third pillar, rests on what China now calls new quality productive forces: future-facing industries powered by technology rather than cheap land or labor. In 2025, the city's strategic emerging industries accounted for 43% of its GDP. Industrial robot output jumped by 43.1% in a single year while civilian drone production rose 40.1%.

This is the native soil of Huawei, Tencent, BYD and DJI – firms that began in workshops and now shape global standards in 5G, electric vehicles and drones. Automaker BYD, for instance, once a battery maker in a Shenzhen factory, outsold Tesla in EVs worldwide last year.

Nor is the pipeline neglected: investment in R&D and technical services climbed by 16.1% last year even as overall fixed-asset investment contracted, a quiet but telling verdict on where Shenzhen adjudges its future.

The macroeconomic frame binds these strands together. From 270 million yuan in 1980 to 3.87 trillion yuan in 2025, Shenzhen's GDP has averaged a double-digit annual expansion for four and a half decades, arguably the fastest sustained growth of any city in economic history.

Yet the deeper lesson of Shenzhen is not speed but method. Reform here proceeds through pilots first and rollouts later, with latitude to try and room to fail. Openness means competing on rules and on trust, not on cost alone. Innovation means letting enterprises, not edicts, pick technological winners. Each element reinforces the others: reform lowers the friction, openness widens the horizon, and innovation supplies the fuel.

When APEC leaders gather in Shenzhen next month, they will not merely visit a prosperous city. They will find a living demonstration of a proposition still contested across the Asia-Pacific: Can an economy open itself to the world, reform itself without pause, and still hold its people at the center?

Shenzhen's message is characteristically unassuming: The door opened in 1980 has never closed, and the experiment of reform and innovation has never been finished. That, more than any gleaming skyline, is what makes Shenzhen a success story.