A large populous province in central China wants to retain its college students.

According to Hunan Daily, on September 13, Shen Xiaoming, Secretary of the Hunan Provincial Party Committee, held a symposium with representatives of Shanghai college student entrepreneurs in Shanghai, listening face to face to their entrepreneurial experiences as well as their opinions and suggestions on Hunan's work to promote college student entrepreneurship.

During the exchange, the participants put forward opinions and suggestions on Hunan's work to support college student entrepreneurship, focusing on building an open and inclusive entrepreneurial culture, promoting leading enterprises to participate in the construction of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, providing full-life-cycle services, giving full play to the role of the fund matrix and professional incubators, and encouraging front-line industrial engineers to enter colleges and universities.

On September 12, Shen Xiaoming also visited and investigated representative science and innovation enterprises and institutions in Shanghai. During the inspection, he stated that Hunan has comparative advantages in industry, ecology, livability and other aspects. It should learn from the good experiences and practices of advanced regions, strengthen model innovation, resource integration and service optimization, and attract more young people to start businesses and innovate in Hunan.

For Hunan, supporting college students to start businesses has long been regarded as a "strategic choice related to long-term development".

As early as September 2024, Shen Xiaoming sent an invitation at the Internet Yuelu Summit, inviting college students from all over the country and even the world to innovate and start businesses in Hunan.

Since then, Hunan has successively issued the *Several Policies and Measures of Hunan Province to Vigorously Support College Student Entrepreneurship* and the *Implementation Opinions on Building a Youth-Friendly Province*, and set up the country's first government investment fund for college student entrepreneurship, with an initial phase size of 505 million yuan, to provide the "first bucket of gold" for college student entrepreneurs.

Behind this is the dual pressure of population agglomeration and industrial upgrading in Hunan.

As a traditional major province with a large population, Hunan has seen continuous negative population growth in recent years. By the end of 2025, the permanent resident population of Hunan was 64.92 million, a decrease of 470,000 compared with the previous year, the largest decrease across the country.

The deeper hidden concern is that in recent years, both the natural population growth and mechanical population growth of Hunan have declined, with a net outflow of more than 180,000 people in 2025, and the outflow scale also ranks among the top in the country.

The signal on the talent side is even more prominent. Hunan has 147 regular universities and 3 985 Project universities, with more than 2 million college students on campus, ranking among the top in China.

According to the data released by the Hunan Provincial Department of Education, the retention rate of 2023 college graduates in Hunan was 57.29%, and nearly 20% of the graduates moved to Guangdong. In comparison, Anhui, which is also located in central China, had a 71% retention rate of its 2023 college graduates in the province.

At the same time, Hunan's economy has long relied on traditional advantageous industries such as construction machinery. With the in-depth adjustment of infrastructure and real estate, these "ballast stones" are under collective pressure; while the emerging industries are still small in scale, and their growth is not enough to fill the gap left by the decline of traditional industries. Dragged down by this, Hunan's total GDP in the first half of the year was overtaken by Anhui, dropping out of the top ten across the country.

"Our traditional advantageous industries are undergoing in-depth adjustment, while the 'fish' carefully nurtured by others has grown up." As *Hunan Daily* pointed out, when Anhui's integrated circuit industry and Hubei's optoelectronic information industry have become national strategic forces, Hunan's new growth momentum has not yet been fully formed.

Against this background, Hunan hopes to give full play to its advantages of "low living cost and high quality of life" to amplify the multiplier effect of entrepreneurship driving employment.

According to Hunan's own judgment, as an inland province in central China, Hunan's resource advantages are not particularly prominent. "If we want to develop well, we must naturally do a good job in the work related to people, especially young people."

Just recently, Hunan has further increased its support, issuing the *Several Measures of Hunan Province for Coordinated Fiscal and Financial Support for College Student Entrepreneurship*, to build a policy system covering the "seed stage - growth stage - expansion stage". At the same time, the number of entrepreneurship funds has expanded from 1 to 5, and 1 relay fund has been set up as a supporting facility, creating a provincial-level "1+4+1" college student venture capital fund matrix with a total size of 1.2 billion yuan.

Hunan's determination to leverage industrial breakthrough through talent recruitment is beyond doubt. But whether it can achieve real results still needs to be tested by time.

This article is from the WeChat official account "City Evolution", author: Liu Yanmei, published with authorization from 36Kr.