As regional 2025 economic reports are released, a significant announcement marks a new micro-level milestone in China's regional economic development. Shortly before the Spring Festival, Shenzhen's Nanshan District officially announced that its 2025 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is projected to surpass the one trillion yuan threshold, successfully entering the "trillion-yuan club." This achievement not only makes Nanshan the administrative district with the largest economic output in Guangdong Province and across China but also sets a historical precedent as the first urban district nationwide to exceed a trillion yuan in GDP.
Occupying less than one-tenth of Shenzhen's total land area, Nanshan contributes over one-quarter of the city's total economic output. Its 2025 GDP is projected to exceed one trillion yuan, with a growth rate surpassing 6%, resulting in an economic output density of approximately 5.46 billion yuan per square kilometer. This figure is several times higher than the national average of Singapore and is rapidly approaching levels seen in core areas like Manhattan, New York.
Against a backdrop of extremely scarce land resources, the "Nanshan model" of generating immense value from limited space is fundamentally a "density revolution." This approach trades extreme spatial compression for maximized activity of innovation factors. Why has this high-cost space become an engine for innovation? The leapfrog achievements of Nanshan District are a paradigm driven by Total Factor Productivity (TFP), rather than a victory fueled by traditional factor inputs. The fact that 187 square kilometers of land supports a trillion-yuan GDP signifies that growth has completely detached from reliance on land expansion, shifting instead towards an "efficiency premium" generated by the high-frequency collision of talent, technology, and capital within a minimal physical space.
This "high-density development" is an inevitable choice stemming from Shenzhen's land scarcity and a proactive breakthrough in urban management. During peak hours on weekdays, large crowds of commuters concentrate at Liuxiandong Metro Station for transfers. Following the flow of people reveals that many commuters head towards buildings housing over 20 leading technology companies, such as DJI, Transsion, Ubtech, and Sangfor. These enterprises function as high-energy nodes, weaving a dense network of innovation within a confined space.
Nanshan has transformed compact space into a strategic advantage for catalyzing innovation through refined urban operations and Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) models, challenging the traditional view that high spatial costs inevitably drive out innovation. The extreme reduction of physical distance significantly lowers the cost of knowledge spillover. In Nanshan, finding a chip supplier or a seasoned algorithm expert might only take the duration of a coffee break. This irreplaceable advantage in communication costs and spatial stickiness effectively offsets high operational expenses, forming a core competitive barrier for companies.
How is this innovation ecosystem, catalyzed by spatial compression, vividly manifested in industrial carriers like Nanshan Zhiyuan? An investigation reveals an innovation ecosystem where companies cluster across multiple fields, including artificial intelligence, robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles, optical communication, and semiconductors. Within this park, Shenzhen Core Medical Technology Co., Ltd., which focuses on artificial heart research and development, is a typical beneficiary of Nanshan's high-density innovation ecosystem. The company chose to establish itself in Shenzhen's Nanshan District precisely because of the unique advantages offered by the Greater Bay Area, including advanced manufacturing supply chains, comprehensive supporting facilities, and strengths in innovative talent, supply chains, and the business environment.
If high density is Nanshan's physical form, then the trinity of "education/research - finance - R&D" forms the core engine for its value creation. This ecosystem is vividly embodied in the Xili Lake International Sci-Tech City: universities and new-type R&D institutions provide original innovation, venture capital supplies financial "lifelines," and companies accomplish rapid transformation in nearby industrial spaces. This highly efficient, collaborative innovation loop demonstrates powerful conversion capabilities in practice. The interactive logic here features an extremely short conversion path. In 2025, Nanshan possessed 860 invention patents per 10,000 people, a benefit derived from the "daring leap" from laboratory to market.
The patience and professionalism of financial "lifelines" are crucial support for hard-tech companies crossing the "valley of death." Since initiating financing in 2019, Core Medical has completed six rounds of funding. Support from "patient capital" enabled the successful market launch of its independently developed fully magnetically levitated implantable artificial heart, Corheart® 6, which has treated over 1,200 heart failure patients. Nanshan's capital environment demonstrates a risk appetite willing to accompany hard-tech companies through long cycles, with professionalism stemming from a deep understanding of the medical device industry chain.
Nanshan District's "Six Ones" full-chain support system includes: welcoming a person (talent), arranging a room (space), providing a desk (incubation), supporting with funds (financing), opening an application scenario (market), and offering one-stop services (policy). In its early stages, a company moved into the Nanshan Science and Technology Ecological Park, enjoying three years of rent-free office space and computing power subsidies, which significantly reduced startup costs.
Dense industrial ecosystem collaboration makes hard technology "valuable" and "quickly valuable." A company's headquarters might be within 5 kilometers of equipment manufacturers and within 10 kilometers of partners producing photodiodes and ASIC chips. This density convinces investors that investing is not just funding a single materials company, but a key link in a multi-hundred-billion-yuan industrial cluster, resulting in an "ecosystem premium" on valuation.
Entering the trillion-yuan phase, Nanshan faces new challenges: diminishing marginal utility of application-layer innovation, intensified competition from surrounding administrative districts, and external risks from global technological competition. To break through growth limits, Nanshan must transition from application integration to fundamental technological breakthroughs, opening a new front in basic research. Companies are already taking action. One company is leveraging major scientific infrastructure布局 around Xili Lake International Sci-Tech City to pivot its scintillation crystal technology from "the eye of medicine" to "the eye of energy," tackling materials for nuclear fusion detectors. It is applying to include its crystal material verification platform in the user open systems of major scientific installations. Simultaneously, the company is collaborating with a terahertz laboratory, utilizing the "cross-border scientific research funding pool" policy in the Hetao Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Cooperation Zone to jointly develop handheld neutron detectors based on new crystals. This policy allows research funds to flow freely between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, with fiscal measures covering personal income tax rate differences, which is crucial for attracting top international talent.
Nanshan's innovation ecosystem not only provides policy and resource support for cutting-edge technology R&D but also injects strong momentum into companies' international development. As the only company globally to achieve commercial deployment of both implantable and interventional artificial hearts, Core Medical is leveraging the Greater Bay Area's clinical resources and supply chain advantages to promote product expansion overseas. The company has established clinical collaborations with over 120 hospitals, including renowned domestic and international institutions. It has successfully commercialized artificial heart implants in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, setting a record for Chinese artificial heart companies obtaining overseas market approval and providing comprehensive heart failure solutions for patients worldwide.
The Greater Bay Area, with its concentration of innovative talent, regulatory review innovations, and complete high-end manufacturing supply chains, provides efficient full-chain support for artificial heart development, from R&D iteration and clinical需求转化 to regulatory approval and market launch. However, the ascent of hard technology requires deeper ecosystem support. There are calls for establishing a relay mechanism combining "proof-of-concept + pilot-scale amplification," promoting a valuation system linking "patient capital" to "technology readiness levels," and shifting from "providing policies" to "building ecosystems," strengthening the government's role as an "innovation architect." Suggestions include setting up hard-tech patent pools, regularly implementing "unveiling the list and appointing the best" mechanisms, and focusing on cultivating hidden champion companies that master critical "gatekeeper technologies."
A trillion-yuan GDP is a "coming-of-age ceremony" for Nanshan, but it is by no means the final destination. As one executive stated, "Nanshan's next trillion should not be a GDP figure, but rather the number of world-class patents, global standards set, and hidden champion companies." Within the framework of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, whether Nanshan can leverage its industrial conversion capabilities to complement Hong Kong's basic research strengths, build a Shenzhen-Hong Kong innovation community, and achieve a strategic leap from a regional center to a global source of technological innovation will determine if its "inches of land" can continuously yield "world-class true gold."
Nanshan's practice demonstrates that under hard land constraints, achieving sustained improvement in Total Factor Productivity through the high-density aggregation and high-frequency interaction of innovation factors is a viable path for China's high-quality economic development. How to institutionalize and ecologize this path, and nurture more fundamental technological breakthroughs from 0 to 1, will be the long-term question Nanshan leaves for the development of China's innovative cities.