Shenzhen pilot area's success to be key to China's structural transition: US expert

NEW YORK - The success of the Shenzhen pilot demonstration will be "key to the financial and economic deepening of China's structural transition," said a US expert on China.

"As China transitions from being a high-growth to a quality-growth economy, Shenzhen embodies the potential to once again become that magnet of reform and opening-up that it had been 40 years ago," Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for China-America Studies, told Xinhua on Tuesday.

China has recently announced that it will build the southern Chinese city into a pilot demonstration area of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

In Gupta's view, the Shenzhen pilot demonstration and the broader Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) initiative unveiled in February this year, is "the perhaps most exciting real-world economic experiment that is currently on-going."

"Three legal jurisdictions with differing common-civil law approaches coming together to form an economic integration space. That's fascinating," he said.

"This is a journey to high-quality growth that has just begun and Shenzhen's success will be key to the financial and economic deepening of China's structural transition," he said.

By 2025, Shenzhen will become one of the leading cities in the world in terms of economic strength and quality of development. Its research and development input, industrial innovation capacity, and the quality of its public services and ecological environment will be first-rate in the world, according to a document issued by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council on Aug 18.

By 2035, Shenzhen will become a national model of high-quality development, as well as a hub of innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity with international influence.

By mid-21st century, the city will become one of the top cosmopolis in the world and a global pacesetter with outstanding competitiveness, innovative capacity and influence, said the document.

Shenzhen, a major city in South China's Guangdong province, is the country's first special economic zone. It has a population of about 13 million and its gross domestic product hit 2.42 trillion yuan (about $346 billion) in 2018, up 7.6 percent year-on-year.

The GBA consists of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), the Macao Special Administrative Region (Macao SAR), as well as nine cities in Guangdong Province - Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen and Zhaoqing.