With the final sprint approaching, this central city is making in-depth internal adjustments.
According to a report from Nanjing Daily on July 8, "Several Measures of Nanjing Municipality on Deepening Coordinated and Linked Development Across the City" has been recently issued and implemented. The document comprises four major sections with 11 specific measures, covering targeted development based on comparative advantages, paired collaborative development between districts, support for cross-district enclave industrial parks, and improved municipal-level coordination mechanisms. It aims to strengthen the city's holistic development orientation, build an integrated, open, coordinated and efficient linked development pattern, further standardize investment promotion practices, curb homogeneous and "involution-style" competition, promote the local industrial transformation of scientific and technological innovation resources, and better support the strategy of building a strong industrial city and the core urban function of "Two Zones and Three Centers".
Centered on Nanjing, the Nanjing Metropolitan Area, as China's first nationally approved cross-provincial metropolitan area, recorded a GDP of 5.67 trillion yuan in 2025, accounting for 4.0% of the national total. However, pursuing high-quality development requires more than just outward expansion. As Nanjing authorities noted, amid intensifying regional competition, it is urgent for all districts to support each other, leverage their respective strengths, and complement each other's advantages, jointly overcoming bottlenecks and forging collective strengths through cross-district collaboration.
Nanjing achieved a GDP of 1.94 trillion yuan in 2025, ranking 10th nationwide. Its follower Ningbo posted a GDP of 1.87 trillion yuan the same year, with the gap between the two cities less than 100 billion yuan. According to experts, one major challenge for Nanjing lies in its industrial structure: the cultivation of emerging industries has been relatively slow in recent years, while a large number of traditional chemical enterprises have relocated to northern Jiangsu, resulting in the dilemma that "traditional industries have not been fully retained, and new industries have not yet taken root".
In March this year, a proposal released by the Nanjing Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference titled "Suggestions on Building a Matrix-style Industrial Ecosystem to Foster a New Pattern of Innovative Development in Nanjing" directly pointed out the core pain points: despite Nanjing's abundant science and education resources and solid industrial foundation, the city still faces structural challenges of being "large but not strong, concentrated but not optimized". Its industrial value-added capacity needs to be improved, the integration of innovation chains and industrial chains is not sufficiently close, and the echelon structure of local enterprises remains imperfect.
The proposal notes that Nanjing lacks a powerful municipal-level overall coordination mechanism for spatial and industrial planning. Key industrial parks including Jiangbei New Area, Jiangning Development Zone, and Jiangning High-tech Zone show significant overlaps in their selection of leading industries. This leads to inefficient resource allocation: enterprises swarm into popular sectors to chase policy dividends, ignoring their own differentiated advantages. As a result, low-level regional competition intensifies, scarce elements such as land, capital and talent are fragmented and wasted, making it difficult to form internationally competitive characteristic industrial clusters and clear industrial ecological niches.
Currently, Nanjing is at a critical juncture of advancing toward a higher comprehensive urban functional level. Beyond striving for a 2-trillion-yuan economic aggregate, the recently publicized "Nanjing Municipal Territorial Spatial Recent Implementation Plan (2026-2030)" clarifies that by 2030, Nanjing's permanent resident population will exceed 10 million, land use efficiency will continue to improve to reach a per-square-kilometer GDP output of 2 billion yuan, achieving a precise balance between urban expansion and quality enhancement.
The newly released "Several Measures" provides practical action guidelines for achieving these goals. It requires all districts to develop distinctive and differentiated development paths based on their resource endowments, functional positioning and industrial foundations. For example, the central urban districts will focus on high-end sectors including the digital economy, headquarters economy, modern finance, cultural tourism and trade, and professional services; industrial-bearing areas such as Jiangbei New Area, Jiangning District and Qixia District will strengthen their competitive industries including advanced manufacturing, integrated circuits, biomedicine and intelligent equipment.
Differentiated development addresses the question of "where to go", while "how to get there" is equally critical. The "Several Measures" proposes to encourage all districts to break through administrative division restrictions, focusing on fields such as advanced manufacturing, future industries, transformation of scientific and technological achievements, and pilot-scale incubation. It promotes models including "R&D and incubation in central urban areas, production and manufacturing in industrial-bearing zones", "linkage between headquarters economy and manufacturing bases", and "joint investment attraction, off-site operation, and shared benefits", to jointly build industrial enclaves and collaborative development carriers.
This article is from the WeChat public account"Urban Evolution Theory", written by Yang Huan, and published with authorization from 36Kr.