Even Suzhou envies: How did Yulin become the strongest prefecture-level city in central and western China?

Suzhou is the most powerful prefecture-level city in China. Everyone knows this.

But if you ask, which is the most powerful prefecture-level city in central and western China?

I'm afraid it will surprise most people: Yulin, Shaanxi.

Just how wealthy is Yulin?

Let's start with the numbers.

In the first half of this year, Yulin's GDP was 348.5 billion yuan.

You may not have a clear concept. It ranks first among prefecture-level cities in central and western China, even higher than cities like Jinhua in Zhejiang (Yiwu is a county-level city under the jurisdiction of Jinhua), Luoyang, and Zhuhai, and also higher than provincial capitals such as Nanning and Taiyuan.

Let me give you two more examples.

First, since the spring of 2013, Yulin has implemented 15 years of free education (from kindergarten to high school).

In 2008, Shenmu, a county under Yulin's jurisdiction, even started providing free medical care for all its residents.

Moreover, there is one thing that even makes Suzhou envious: Yulin has an airport.

According to the latest information, during the winter flight season in 2025, Yulin Airport has 38 routes and serves 43 cities.

Not only does it have an airport, but during the tourist season, you can even take direct flights to foreign cities such as those in Vietnam, South Korea, and Japan.

The flight routes and served cities of Yulin during the winter flight season in 2025. What makes Yulin so special?

01 The Richness Myth of a Fourth-Tier City

At first, Yulin didn't have a good hand in the game of development.

Geographically, it is located at the junction of five provinces: Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, and Shanxi. The terrain is mainly mountains and hills, and to the north lies the Mu Us Desert.

It covers a total area of 42,900 square kilometers, which is as large as the whole country of Denmark.

However, its registered population is only about 3.8589 million, equivalent to 84 people per square kilometer.

With such a vast area and sparse population, what could it be used for?

As a battlefield.

During the reign of Emperor Chongzhen in the Ming Dynasty, Li Zicheng's rebel army attacked Yulin Town. After the city fell, no one surrendered. During the reign of Emperor Kangxi in the Qing Dynasty, Yulin Guard resisted the rebels led by Zhou Shimin and was commended with an imperial inscription from Emperor Kangxi.

During the Anti-Japanese War, the military and civilians in Yulin fought desperately and put forward the slogan "Don't let the Japanese invaders cross the Yellow River even one step."

Much of the memorable history of Yulin can be summarized in two words: sacrifice.

The location of Yulin in Shaanxi Province

But sometimes, fate can change in an instant.

Until the 1980s, when China faced a shortage of coal supply, the state designated the Ordos Basin as a key area for coal exploration. In 1981, the 185th Team of the Shaanxi Coalfield Geological Exploration Company was ordered to enter the Mu Us Desert. After several months of exploration, they finally discovered a large coalfield with a reserve of 87.7 billion tons.

That is today's Shenfu Coalfield in Yulin.

The Shenfu Coalfield

Yulin also gathered the right timing, geographical advantages, and human harmony for development.

Let's start with the right timing.

There was a short time interval between the discovery of the coal mine in Yulin and the development of the market economy. After the coal price was liberalized, in 2001, it caught up with the rapid development period after China's accession to the WTO.

A practitioner in the mineral resources industry once calculated an account in front of a media outlet:

"In 2005, there was a profit of 120 yuan per ton of coal. For a coal mine with an annual output of 5 million tons, the annual profit would be 500 to 600 million yuan."

You know, Yulin is extremely rich in mineral resources. If calculated by land area, it is equivalent to having 6 tons of coal, 140 kilograms of oil, and 1 cubic meter of natural gas under each square meter of land, which is even more extravagant than the wealthy in Saudi Arabia in the Middle East.

The coal mining industry itself is a lucrative one, and Yulin's large-scale operation has magnified this industry effect.

At its peak, tens of thousands of billionaires emerged in Yulin, and it was envied by outsiders as "every family has real estate, and every household has a pawnshop."

During the years when housing prices soared in China, coal mine owners in Yulin would buy an entire unit of apartments in Xi'an at a time.

One tycoon would go to grab an apartment, and another would ask him to buy the same one over the phone.

At an auto show, the sales volume in Yulin could reach 150 million yuan. Some people even joked: "The rich in Yulin think an 800,000-yuan Audi A6 is too tacky."

The "big city feel" of Yulin with high-rise buildings everywhere

In terms of geographical advantages, Yulin's mineral resources stand out.

Not only are the coal mines shallow-buried and have thick coal seams, but the geological conditions are also relatively simple. The mining cost is only about 100 yuan per ton, which is lower than that of many neighboring mining areas.

Meanwhile, Yulin is not only rich in coal.

It has 48 types of minerals in 8 major categories, including the world's second-largest coal mine, about 6 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, over 600 million tons of oil, and over 800 billion tons of rock salt. Its magnesium metal production accounts for over 40% of the world's total, making it the world's largest magnesium metal production base.

Many of these resources are important national strategic resources.

This has further enabled Yulin to gain national support and meet the third condition for development: human harmony.

Therefore, over the decades, the state has invested tens of billions in Yulin's transportation, building major projects such as the Baotou-Shenmu Railway, the Shenmu-Shuozhou Railway, and the Yulin-Jingbian Expressway, making Yulin a regional transportation hub and completely changing its once isolated and backward appearance.

An overpass in Yulin. Photography: Huang Yan

In 2016, China issued the "Construction and Development Plan for China-Europe Freight Trains (2016 - 2020)." Yulin once again caught the dividend of the upgrade of overseas trade transportation capacity. At the end of 2020, the "Yulin - Western Europe" special freight train was launched, transporting local chemical raw materials, spare parts, and other commodities to overseas markets in Europe, Southeast Asia, etc.

With the right timing, geographical advantages, and human harmony all in place, even a third or fourth-tier city like Yulin can achieve a rapid leap in economic development.

Let's take a look at Yulin's per capita GDP data in recent years:

In 2021, Yulin's per capita GDP reached 149,900 yuan, ranking first in Shaanxi Province.

In 2023, Yulin's per capita GDP was 196,300 yuan, rising 15 places to rank 5th in the country.

In 2024, Yulin's per capita GDP continued to rise to 209,300 yuan, approaching Shanghai's 216,800 yuan (higher than that of Shenzhen and Suzhou).

Economic data is just one of the results of development. The industrial sector is the highlight in achieving this result.

02 How to Solve the "Resource Curse"?

Yulin is known as the "Chinese Kuwait."

Actually, it just means the city has rich mineral resources.

But as we know, Yulin is not the only city with rich mineral resources.

Why is Yulin different?

Most of China's mineral resources are actually "national strategic resources."

Yulin's coal, characterized by extremely low ash, sulfur, and phosphorus content, and medium to high calorific value, is high-quality coal for chemical and power generation purposes, and naturally falls into this category.

After China's accession to the WTO in 2001, China's GDP growth rate remained above 10% for many consecutive years. The processes of industrialization and urbanization accelerated comprehensively, and the thermal power generation increased rapidly. As one of the production raw materials, the price of coal also soared, resulting in the "Golden Decade" of the coal industry after 2002. The coal price rose from 275 yuan per ton in 2002 to 853 yuan per ton in 2011.

Capital also saw the prospects of the coal mine.

For a time, 3.1 trillion yuan of capital poured into the coal mining industry. The wild growth in a way like adding fuel to the fire made the number of coal mines across the country soar to tens of thousands, and also plunged cities like Yulin into the nightmare of overcapacity.

The coal price was on the verge of collapse.

At the beginning of 2015, the "Bohai Rim Steam Coal Price Index" dropped from 520 yuan per ton at the beginning of the year to 372 yuan per ton at the end of the year. The total number of coal mines in the country dropped to about 10,000 in 2015.

Some coal-producing provinces paid a heavy price for this, and even in many counties, there were varying degrees of wage arrears.

Let's turn our attention back to Yulin. In this coal price adjustment, local coal mines with an annual output of less than 300,000 tons were basically eliminated.

Low-end production capacity is not desirable. The cliff-like drop in coal price was like a major reckoning for enterprises that simply "dug coal and sold it for money."

Yulin's conclusion from self-reflection is:

China is not short of energy, but it lacks high-end energy products.

Meanwhile, for Yulin to develop, it is not enough to rely only on capital support. It also needs to be based on the Chinese market and China's strategy.

In 2015, China's "13th Five-Year Plan" proposed supply-side reform, and one of the cores was "reducing overcapacity and adjusting the structure."

One of Yulin's solutions is to upgrade technology to improve thermal efficiency and reduce carbon emissions.

Let me give you an example.

There is an important product in the coal chemical industry chain: semi-coke.

It is an indispensable high-quality reducing agent in the production of products such as calcium carbide, ferrosilicon, ferromanganese silicon, and magnesium metal.

Previously, the production of semi-coke would produce raw gas containing impurities such as tar, dust, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide. The main treatment methods were to discharge it into the atmosphere or burn it directly, which is commonly known as "lighting the sky lantern" in the industry.

Before 2006, many coal mines used the "lighting the sky lantern" method to treat raw gas.

But now, after purification treatments such as dust removal, desulfurization, and de-tarring of the "raw gas," clean combustible gases such as hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane are left. These gases can be collected and recycled for further smelting of magnesium metal.

In the end, the waste slag generated in the coal chemical industry and magnesium metal smelting processes can also be used to produce cement and non-fired bricks.

By extending the industrial chain, coal chemical enterprises in Yulin can absorb nutrients at each link, continuously develop and grow themselves through the cycle, and in turn, contribute to urban construction.

The second solution lies in a set of data: Last year, about 55% of China's coal was used in the power industry, and only about 8% was used in the chemical industry.

However, as the world's largest manufacturing country, we can obtain many raw materials from coal to make children's toys, chemical fibers in clothes, and even plastic bags for grocery shopping all over the world.

How does coal become a raw material?

Let me give you another example.

In addition to producing coal, Yulin also has a large amount of rock salt. These two minerals can intersect in the coal chemical and salt chemical industries and jointly produce many important chemical raw materials.

A coal chemical industry base in Yulin

First, methanol produced in the coal chemical industry can be further processed to produce olefins,