Shenzhen: Charting New Frontiers
Shenzhen’s GDP reached 1.83 trillion yuan in the first half of 2025, up 5.1% year-on-year—a performance many view as remarkable given the headwinds of US–China trade frictions, geopolitical tensions and domestic economic pressures.
To advance further, the city is betting on reform and high-level opening-up. On June 10, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the Opinions on Further Advancing Shenzhen’s Comprehensive Pilot Reforms to Deepen Reform and Innovation and Expand Opening up. Coming at the 45th anniversary of the establishment of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, the release of this document could not be more timely.
In its early days, Shenzhen’s mission was to break through the planned economy’s constraints, join global value chains, and leverage China’s comparative advantages. Today, its challenge is to help the country navigate a de-globalising world: cultivating new growth space while balancing security, autonomy and the benefits of openness in a reshaped global supply chain.
The Evolution of Technological Innovation
Shenzhen’s innovation model flips the conventional sequence. Instead of waiting for basic research to trickle down, it starts from market needs, rapidly pushing ideas through industrialisation, applied research and commercialisation. This pragmatic, demand-driven approach has created a fast-paced, open and highly responsive innovation ecosystem.
With its unique innovation DNA and ecosystem advantages, Shenzhen is realising a “two-way journey” between industrial demand and scientific origins. On one hand, its strong industrialisation capacity and market sensitivity enable it to quickly transform cutting-edge scientific achievements into real productive forces. On the other, Shenzhen is increasing its investment in basic research and attracting top domestic and international research institutions and universities. This two-way, mutually reinforcing model of innovation is set to spark new breakthroughs in the age of intelligence.
Taking Embodied Intelligence Beyond the Myth
Zhang Zhengyou is widely regarded as a world-class scientist. From developing the world’s first robot to navigate using stereo vision, to creating the first neural network–based facial expression recognition system, to inventing the globally adopted “Zhang’s calibration method”, he has made pioneering contributions in stereo vision, 3D reconstruction, motion analysis, image registration, self-calibration of cameras, facial expression recognition and robot navigation.
Zhang argues that embodied intelligence and humanoid robots are not the same concept, and that China’s embodied intelligence ecosystem is still at an early stage. His decision to return to China was driven by a desire to promote technology progress that is scenario-driven, impacts societal change, and solves real-world problems. As a scientist, his mission is to facilitate the co-evolution and practical implementation of “body” and “intelligence” in dynamic environments, and to create more optimal forms of human–machine interaction.
Building the Future Sky City
Once the “drone capital”, Shenzhen is now staking its claim as China’s leading low-altitude economy hub. An eVTOL craft can cross the Pearl River estuary in 20 minutes; drones deliver food 24/7; automated nests inspect thousands of kilometres of power lines. This leap rests on more than technology. Shenzhen has carved out 309 controlled airspaces, built a unified dispatch platform, trialed record-based flight approvals, and established China’s first low-altitude governance framework. Shenzhen is not only reshaping the skies, but also redefining the spatial order and operational logic of future cities.
Shenzhen’s rise as the “drone capital” was powered by technological and product innovation; its transition to “the leading city for the low-altitude economy” rests on policy breakthroughs and cross-departmental collaboration. Through a reform experiment in airspace governance, Shenzhen is opening the third dimension for the cities of the future.
