Backed by the vast southwest, facing the Beibu Gulf, and linked by land and sea to ASEAN, Guangxi was once regarded as a transport dead end. Today, however, cargo ships sail out from here, digital tokens flow out from here, and industries thrive here. The land of Guangxi is presenting four calling cards to the world: location, canal, AI and industry. They all tell the same story: growing strong by embracing the sea.

Location calling card: from remote borderland to frontier

Location is an endowment, but it only pays off through openness. When the first China-ASEAN Expo was held in 2004, trade between China and ASEAN stood at US$105.88 billion. By 2025, that figure reached US$1.05 trillion, nearly ten times the level of that year. ASEAN has been Guangxi's largest trading partner for 26 consecutive years. In Pingxiang, the country's first standardized fruit laboratory at a border port has cut testing time for imported and exported fruit by 40 percent, reducing customs clearance costs by nearly 2,000 yuan per container. Fresh fruit picked in orchards in Vietnam and Thailand can enter through Guangxi ports and reach domestic supermarket shelves in as little as 48 hours. In the first eight months of this year, Guangxi ports imported about 30.45 billion yuan worth of ASEAN fruit, up 13.2 percent, accounting for more than one third of the national total. One out of every two imported durians in China enters through Guangxi. The radius of openness extends beyond ASEAN.

In the first eight months, Guangxi's total imports and exports with ASEAN reached 284.69 billion yuan, making up more than half of its foreign trade. Its imports and exports with Africa, the EU and Latin America grew by 23.8 percent, 27.5 percent and 33.2 percent respectively. Ding Jinxue, director of the Comprehensive Research Office of the Comprehensive Transportation Research Institute under the National Development and Reform Commission, said Guangxi is China's only province that is connected to ASEAN by both land and sea and serves as a frontier and window for China's opening-up and cooperation with ASEAN. Its position and role in the country's overall opening-up landscape are becoming increasingly prominent.

China-ASEAN Commodity Convergence Center. Photo by Zhu Huichun

Canal calling card: Pinglu Canal links rivers and sea

With the sound of a whistle, river and sea are connected. In September this year, the Pinglu Canal opened to navigation. This is the first canal project built since the founding of New China that connects a river to the sea, directly linking the Xijiang golden waterway with the Beibu Gulf international gateway port. Goods from the southwest can reach the sea through this route, cutting the inland navigation distance by more than 560 kilometers compared with detouring through Guangzhou, reducing comprehensive logistics costs by 18 percent to 30 percent and saving more than 5 billion yuan in transport costs each year. The canal must be built well, but it must also be operated well and deliver good returns. With the Beibu Gulf Port as its land-sea gateway, the Pinglu Canal Economic Belt as an important link and the New Western Land-Sea Corridor as a strategic driver, Guangxi is promoting the concentration of more resources and industries in the Beibu Gulf Economic Zone, pushing the New Western Land-Sea Corridor to leap from a transport line to an economic network and better serving the construction of a new development pattern through coordinated land-sea development and internal-external connectivity.

Pinglu Canal scenery. File photo

AI calling card: a different path to leapfrog development

In smart factories, intelligent robots are on duty. Beside blast furnaces, large models assess smelting parameters in real time. On assembly lines, AI scheduling systems are showing their strengths. In terms of computing power and algorithms, Guangxi does not lead, yet it has pioneered a differentiated path of research and development in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, integration in Guangxi and application in ASEAN. Its hub is the China-ASEAN Artificial Intelligence Application Cooperation Center, which began construction in September 2025. Here, Chen Xiujuan, enterprise management director of Jiejianrun Technology Group Co., Ltd., told reporters that the company is deeply engaged in smart agriculture and has built cross-border agricultural intelligent decision-making platforms such as the Agricultural Digital Brain and Tudi AI-Max, covering the entire chain before, during and after production and adapting to the differentiated climates, soils and planting models of multiple ASEAN countries. This integrated solution has already served more than 2 million mu of farmland and landed 30 agricultural projects in Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia and other countries, with business extending to Australia and Nigeria, Chen said. At present, more than 300 artificial intelligence enterprises are investing and operating in Guangxi, and 43 cross-border cooperation projects have been facilitated with Laos, Malaysia, Vietnam, Myanmar and other countries. In 2025, the output value of Guangxi's core AI industry in the industrial sector exceeded 89 billion yuan. The channels for AI going global are multiplying.

In June 2024, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology approved the establishment of an international communications business gateway office in Nanning, the fourth in the country after Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and the first addition in 30 years. Twelve cross-border international land communication optical cables and three international submarine cables have been completed. The systems for AI going global are also keeping pace. Guangxi has issued the first negative list for data outbound transfer in the central and western regions and along the border, and the sixth in the country, and has studied and formulated three special lists covering corpus training, model development and delivery, and token exports. At the Nanning Runjian Co., Ltd. Wuxiang Cloud Valley Intelligent Computing Center, reporters learned that the facility has upgraded from renting computing power by card-hours to operating as a token factory. The latency from Nanning to ASEAN is about 15 to 20 milliseconds, and about 20 milliseconds to Singapore. Within 50 milliseconds, humans basically cannot perceive the delay. This is Guangxi's regional advantage, said Li Linqiang, general manager of the public affairs department of Runjian Co., Ltd.

Industry calling card: turning corridor advantages into winning strength

Turning corridor advantages into industrial advantages is the focus of Guangxi's drive to grow strong by embracing the sea. Look at Liuzhou: in the first half of this year, its exports reached 23.25 billion yuan, up 23.3 percent. Its exports of lithium batteries and electric vehicles to ASEAN surged by 819 percent and 314.7 percent respectively. Even a bowl of luosifen crossed the ocean, with exports reaching 45.745 million yuan in the first half, up 19.6 percent. At the Liuzhou Railway Port, export assembly, port functions and customs clearance services have all been moved forward to the doorstep of manufacturing enterprises. The Liuzhou Railway Port serves both as an outlet to the sea for made-in-Liuzhou products and as a transfer station for global goods entering the southwestern hinterland. Look at the Beibu Gulf: high-end metal new materials, green chemical new materials, electronic information and other industries are accelerating their concentration. Guangxi's gross ocean product rose from 137.7 billion yuan in 2017 to 268.78 billion yuan in 2025, and its share of regional GDP increased from 7.7 percent to 9 percent.

A corner of the smart factory of Guangxi Liugong Machinery Co., Ltd. Photo by Wei Jiayue

Today's Guangxi is not only the country's sugar jar and fruit plate, but has also cultivated 10 trillion-yuan-level industries including nonferrous metals, machinery and electronic information. In the first eight months of this year, exports of automobiles and parts grew by 32 percent, imports of bulk commodities such as copper ore and aluminum ore all grew by more than 40 percent, and the scale of the copper concentrate bonded blending pilot remained the largest in the country. In the first half of the year, its gross ocean product reached 137.7 billion yuan, up 6.8 percent year on year. Guangxi's four calling cards are closely linked. Location attracts corridors, corridors support industries, AI gives industries wings, and industries in turn give greater weight to location. Prospering and growing strong by embracing the sea, the story of Guangxi's openness is turning a new page.