Gap in counties with GDP exceeding 100 billion yuan, slowing growth rate of the provincial capital: the growth anxiety of a central Chinese province
The weight of county-level economy is continuously rising in the coordinate system of local development.
Not long ago, the Hunan Provincial Conference on High-Quality Development of County-Level Economy was held in Changsha. This is the fourth consecutive year that Hunan has held a top-level county-level economy conference, and it is also the highest-standard county-level economy conference held in the opening year of the 15th Five-Year Plan period. The conference made it clear that efforts should be made to promote the balanced development of county-level economy, give full play to the leading role of economically strong counties, build a tiered development pattern, and drive the high-quality development of small counties with small population size.
At the same time, Hunan's direction of strengthening the primacy of Changsha, implementing the "Strong Provincial Capital" strategy, and expanding the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan metropolitan area remains unchanged.
Hunan proposed in its 15th Five-Year Plan Outline to implement the integrated development promotion action of Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan, accelerate the cultivation of a modern metropolitan area, and build an important growth pole that supports the accelerated rise of the central region.
The question then arises: When the county-level economy, the strong provincial capital strategy and the metropolitan area strategy are advanced simultaneously, how should Hunan handle the relationship between strengthening county-level economies and expanding the core central city?
The Shortcomings of Hunan's Counties Lie in the "Waist Tier"
To understand Hunan's concerns, let's first look at a set of comparisons.
As a central province, Hunan only has three counties (cities) on the 2025 CCID Top 100 Counties List, namely Changsha County (10th), Liuyang City (21st) and Ningxiang City (25th), the same number as last year. Hubei, by contrast, has 8 entries, ranking first in central China and fourth nationwide, second only to Jiangsu (25 entries), Zhejiang (15 entries) and Shandong (12 entries).
The gap in counties with GDP exceeding 100 billion yuan is also obvious. As of 2025, Hubei has 4 counties with GDP over 100 billion yuan, namely Xiantao, Qianjiang, Yidu and Daye, while Hunan still has only 3 such counties, and no new county has joined the 100-billion-yuan GDP club in Hunan for nearly 10 years.
What deserves more attention is the "waist echelon" after the 100-billion-yuan GDP counties.
The "near 100-billion-yuan" echelon of Hubei includes "reserve forces" with GDP of 80 billion yuan to 90 billion yuan such as Hanchuan, Zhijiang, Zaoyang and Tianmen. In Hunan, after the three 100-billion-yuan counties, the GDP of the fourth-ranked Liling City reaches 99.61 billion yuan, which is close to the 100-billion-yuan mark. However, the subsequent counties and cities such as Xiangxiang and Xiangtan County mostly have GDP between 50 billion yuan and 70 billion yuan, with an obvious "gap" in the middle.
This exactly explains why Hunan has continued to take county-level development as a priority in recent years. Compared with continuing to strengthen a small number of leading counties, Hunan needs to consider how to drive a large number of counties in the middle and tail tiers to develop.
Giving counties greater autonomy is one of the important directions.
In July 2026, Hunan issued the implementation plan for "delegating power to counties", under which the provincial level delegated 13 administrative licensing items to counties, and at the same time proposed that the municipal level should delegate 20 management authority items to counties.
For counties with small population size, the operation cost is reduced through institutional reform. In the previous pilot, Gucheng County completed the institutional reform for small-population counties, the number of institutional quotas was adjusted from 33 to 23, and the number of county-level coordinating organizations was drastically reduced from 271 to 21.
The goal of these adjustments is, on the one hand, to allow county-level governments to allocate resources more flexibly and promote development, and on the other hand, to reduce approval levels and administrative costs, and improve work efficiency.
However, for county-level economies, greater autonomy alone may not be enough. What is more important is to find industries that can support economic growth.
The 15th Five-Year Plan Outline of Hunan proposes to build a classified county-level characteristic industrial system, expand the "one leading, one characteristic" industries based on local conditions, and cultivate a number of large industrial counties, strong agricultural counties and well-known tourism counties.
The High-Quality Development Conference of County-Level Economy held in September proposed to promote the balanced development of county-level economy, give full play to the leading role of economically strong counties, build a tiered development pattern, and promote the high-quality development of small-population counties. It is necessary to improve the quality and efficiency of county-level industrial development, develop characteristic and advantageous industries based on local conditions, and increase the technical content and added value of industries.
However, from the perspective of the actual situation, there are still many shortcomings in the industrial development of Hunan's county-level economies.
At this High-Quality Development Conference of County-Level Economy, representatives of relevant counties and cities also mentioned that the current county-level economy of Hunan still has problems such as insufficient comprehensive strength, low quality and efficiency of industrial development, and insufficient impetus for the integrated development of urban and rural areas.
Specific to the industry, the characteristic industries in some areas are still concentrated in fields such as tea, camellia oil, citrus and kiwifruit, problems such as homogenization, "small, scattered and weak" still exist, and some industries have not yet moved to the high-end of the industrial chain.
The Growth Rate of Changsha Is Slowing Down
The "Strong Provincial Capital" strategy is another main line in Hunan's development strategy.
The 12th Provincial Party Congress of Hunan held in November 2021 clearly proposed to implement the strong provincial capital strategy, and took promoting the regional integration of Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan and building a core growth pole for the rise of the central region as an important task. In 2022, the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan metropolitan area was approved as a national-level metropolitan area, which is also the first approved national-level metropolitan area in central China, positioned as a nationally important growth pole.
The advancement of the strong provincial capital strategy corresponds to the changes in the regional competition pattern.
The current competition between regions is increasingly focused on the ability to gather resources such as talents, technology, capital and headquarters enterprises. Large cities are often more likely to attract these resources. For Hunan, which is not coastal and lacks advantages such as ports, enhancing Changsha's agglomeration capacity is not only to expand the scale of one city, but also an important starting point to enhance the resource allocation capacity of the whole province for development.
In recent years, the integration of Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan has evolved from the simple transportation connection in the past to deeper coordination in industry, market and other fields.
In 2025, the comprehensive pilot of market-based factor allocation reform for Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan was approved by the State Council, and Hunan's supporting action plan launched 28 reform measures in 7 categories; Park co-construction and industrial cooperation between Changsha, Zhuzhou and Xiangtan are increasing continuously; Intercity projects such as Changsha-Zhuzhou and Changsha-Liuyang are continuously promoted, and the green transformation and development of the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan Ecological Green Heart has also been approved by the State Council.
However, while the strong provincial capital strategy is being advanced, Changsha itself has entered a stage of transformation of development momentum.
In 2025, Changsha's GDP grew by 4.0%, lower than the 4.8% growth rate of Hunan province. In the first half of this year, Changsha's GDP reached 785.764 billion yuan, representing a year-on-year increase of 2.5%, 0.2 and 2.2 percentage points lower than the average level of the whole province and the whole country respectively. The growth rates of the secondary industry and the tertiary industry both rank at the lower end among trillion-GDP cities in China.
For Changsha, industrial transformation and growth gear shifting are accelerating. For Hunan, how to make the industries, talents and resources gathered in the provincial capital spread to the surrounding areas better while continuing to strengthen Changsha will also become a problem to be addressed in the next stage.
The Provincial Capital and Counties Are Not an Either-Or Choice
In recent years, Hunan has been continuously promoting the development of county-level economy on the one hand, and advancing the strong provincial capital strategy on the other. The two main lines are carried out simultaneously, which raises a practical question: will there be competition for resources and development space between the two?
This kind of competition does exist in the short term. No matter investment attraction, land space, or population and talents are all limited, and both the provincial capital and counties need to compete for them. The agglomeration of population in central cities such as Changsha will also put some counties under pressure such as population loss, intensified aging and shrinking consumer market.
However, if we shift our vision from the competition of individual projects and individual plots of land to the long-term relationship of regional development, the relationship between the provincial capital and counties is not a simple zero-sum game.
A strong provincial capital is conducive to gathering talents, capital, technology and market. That is to say, the stronger the agglomeration capacity of Changsha, the easier it is to form industrial, talent and market advantages, which can extend to the surrounding counties through the industrial chain, transportation network and other channels. The development of county-level economy, in turn, can provide larger industrial carrying space for the central city.
The three 100-billion-yuan GDP counties in Hunan, namely Changsha County, Liuyang City and Ningxiang City, all belong to Changsha, and the total GDP of the three regions in 2025 is about 570.8 billion yuan. In other words, the growth of Changsha's economy itself cannot be separated from the support of these county-level economic entities.
What really needs attention is whether this development relationship can be formed across the whole province.
At present, the counties with strong economic strength in Hunan are mostly concentrated around Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan, while there are relatively few counties and regional centers with strong driving capacity in other regions. In contrast, the strong counties in Hubei are distributed around multiple cities such as Yichang, Xiangyang and Huangshi, and different regions have strong county-level economic support.
This raises a more practical question for Hunan: while strengthening Changsha, can it cultivate more central cities and strong counties with driving capacity in other regions. Hunan also proposed in its 15th Five-Year Plan Outline that it should adhere to the unity of pole core driving and whole-region coordination, and promote the optimal combination of resource elements and coordinated industrial division.
The key to making this driving role really play out lies in whether the industries can be connected.
Hunan has proposed to promote the linkage between Changsha's global R&D center and the science and technology innovation and manufacturing platforms of Zhuzhou and Xiangtan, and rely on the transportation network to lay out industrial undertaking platforms in Liling, Youxian, Ningxiang, Liuyang and other places, so as to form a closer connection between R&D, transformation and production.
As early as in the documents related to the strong provincial capital strategy released in 2022, Hunan clearly proposed to promote all prefectures and cities to strengthen cooperation with Changsha in terms of industrial coordination, platform services, R&D transformation and other aspects.
Ultimately, the provincial capital and counties are not an either-or multiple-choice question. What Hunan really needs to figure out is to turn Changsha's "agglomeration" effect into "spillover" effect as soon as possible, so that the strong provincial capital and strong counties will finally meet on the same industrial chain.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Duchengji Studio", written by Li Hang, and authorized for release by 36Kr.