Shenzhen excels at making money and also knows how to spend it wisely.

With the APEC summit around the corner, Shenzhen, as the host city, has delivered an impressive performance report this year.

Let's start with GDP. In the first three quarters of this year, the top 10 GDP cities in Chinese mainland have all been announced. Shenzhen ranks first among the top 10 cities with a steady 6% growth rate, registering an economic increment of 235.4 billion yuan, which is the second highest across the country.

Next comes foreign trade. In the first three quarters, Shenzhen's total import and export volume reached 4.65 trillion yuan, up 38.8% year on year. The figure has exceeded the full-year level of last year, consolidating its position as the No.1 foreign trade city in Chinese mainland.

What is more noteworthy is the AI industrial chain, which determines the future of the city. In the first three quarters, the import and export scale of AI-related components such as integrated circuits in Shenzhen ranked first nationwide, contributing over 60% of Shenzhen's foreign trade increment.

However, to truly understand Shenzhen, we should not only look at how good it is at making money, but also at how wisely it spends money. The strength of a city is not only reflected in how much wealth it creates, but also in where this wealth eventually flows.

Looking through Shenzhen's fiscal ledger, you will find a distinct feature: Shenzhen spends the most generously in three key areas, namely scientific and technological innovation, people's livelihood, and urban safety. In other words, from science and technology, education, medical care to housing, parks, and then to fire protection, disaster prevention and mitigation, Shenzhen is using real money to build a reliable "safety net" for the entire city.

01

First of all, Shenzhen is a city that excels at making money

How good is Shenzhen at making money? In 2025, the general public budget revenue generated within Shenzhen's jurisdiction reached 1.13 trillion yuan, remaining above the trillion-yuan mark for five consecutive years. Of this total, the local-level revenue stood at 416.38 billion yuan, and the central-level revenue hit 713.82 billion yuan.

In other words, Shenzhen not only generates fiscal revenue for itself, but also makes important contributions to the national public finance. What deserves more attention is its revenue structure. Among Shenzhen's local general public budget revenue, tax revenue accounts for as high as 84.3%, leading the country.

What does this indicate? The solid foundation of Shenzhen's fiscal revenue comes largely from industrial development, rather than simply relying on land sales. A large number of outstanding enterprises including Huawei, Tencent, BYD, DJI, China Merchants Bank, Ping An of China, UBTECH, and Insta360 not only underpin Shenzhen's status as a leading city, but also provide sustainable revenue-generating capacity for its public finance.

02

Nearly 7 out of every 10 yuan Shenzhen spends goes to people's livelihood

Being good at making money is only the A-side of Shenzhen, while the often overlooked B-side is that Shenzhen knows how to spend money where it matters most.

The first priority is investment in science and technology. During the 14th Five-Year Plan period, Shenzhen's cumulative fiscal expenditure on science and technology exceeded 210 billion yuan, and its expenditure on basic research reached nearly 30 billion yuan in the first four years, ranking among the top in the country.

This is only the expenditure at the fiscal level. If we look at the total R&D investment of the whole society, Shenzhen's input is even larger. In 2025, Shenzhen's R&D expenditure reached 275.076 billion yuan, accounting for 7.10% of its GDP, tying with Beijing for the first place nationwide.

But what you may not know is that Shenzhen's investment in people's livelihood is equally staggering. In 2025, Shenzhen's general public budget expenditure reached 450.25 billion yuan, of which the nine major categories of people's livelihood expenditure hit 304.88 billion yuan, accounting for 67.7%.

This means that for every 10 yuan Shenzhen's public finance spends, nearly 7 yuan is invested in livelihood-related fields. If we extend the timeline to the past five years, Shenzhen's cumulative livelihood expenditure has reached approximately 1.6 trillion yuan.

First, let's look at education, which is one of the top concerns of the public and also one of the areas where Shenzhen spends the most generously. In 2025, Shenzhen's education expenditure exceeded 100 billion yuan, reaching 102.3 billion yuan. Over the past five years, Shenzhen has built, renovated and expanded 821 primary and secondary schools and kindergartens, adding more than 900,000 new basic education enrollment quotas. That is equivalent to nearly 500 new school places being created on average every single day.

Next, Shenzhen's public finance has also made huge investments in medical care. Over the past five years, Shenzhen has added more than 30,000 medical and health beds, the number of Class-A tertiary hospitals has increased from 18 to 33, and 55 major medical projects have been completed.

Housing and commuting are also two major pain points in Shenzhen's people's livelihood efforts. Over the past five years, more than 600,000 units of indemnificatory housing have been built and raised. The total operating mileage of Shenzhen's metro network reaches 653.7 km, ranking fifth in the country, while its passenger flow intensity and line network density rank first nationwide.

To improve citizens' quality of life, Shenzhen is also building the entire city into a "grand park". In Shenzhen, where land is at a premium, green spaces are not all used for higher development intensity, instead, the ecological network of mountains, forests, coastlines and community green spaces has been well preserved. At present, Shenzhen is home to 1,350 parks, with a per capita park green area of 14.8 square meters, both ranking among the top in the country.

So what has the 1.6 trillion yuan Shenzhen spent on people's livelihood over the past five years eventually turned into?

Desks in schools, hospital beds, subways running underground, parks within walking distance from home, and housing security that ensures people have a place to live...

03

Shenzhen also spends generously on urban safety

In addition to the visible investment in science and technology and people's livelihood, Shenzhen's fiscal support also goes to a very important area: urban safety.

As a megacity, Shenzhen is dotted with high-rise buildings, dense urban villages, a large number of new energy vehicles, and highly concentrated underground spaces and industrial parks — all these are symbols of the city's high prosperity, but at the same time, they also pose complex challenges to urban safety governance.

For example, what if a fire breaks out in a super high-rise building? What if the circuits in old residential communities are aged? How can underground spaces prevent waterlogging when typhoons and rainstorms hit? How to issue timely warnings when geological disasters occur?

These problems are usually not noticeable, but once an accident happens, it will affect thousands of households. Shenzhen's approach is to make safety guarantees in advance and implement fiscal investment upfront.

To improve fire safety guarantee and emergency rescue capabilities, Shenzhen has built more than 450 small fire stations, and over 6,200 micro fire stations have been incorporated into unified dispatch. It is also exploring new technologies such as high-altitude fire extinguishing with drones.

In addition, the city has built 36,000 centralized parking and charging sites for electric bicycles, and no fire-related deaths caused by electric bicycles have occurred for 6 consecutive years; more than 5,000 underground spaces are fully covered by flood control baffles; more than 2,500 emergency management service stations are spread across the city, and over 1,300 shelters can be located with one click on the map.

Some people say that the funds invested in urban safety guarantees cannot generate output value as quickly as industrial funds, but what they bring is the confidence for a city to avoid or reduce accidents in extreme weather, sudden fires and daily travels.

The central government has emphasized on many occasions: "Development is the foundation of security, and security is the condition for development." This sentence actually reveals a very important logic of urban development: Development and security are never an either-or choice. Especially for a city like Shenzhen with highly concentrated population, extremely dense industrial chains and global foreign trade links, its urban safety guarantee is of great importance not only to Shenzhen itself, but also to the whole country.

Shenzhen is about to enter the APEC period, and the world will see an innovative, open and vibrant Shenzhen. But what is more heartwarming than economic growth is Shenzhen's willingness to continuously invest the fruits of development in the lives of ordinary people.

This is also the most noteworthy part of Shenzhen's fiscal investment: it invests not only in infrastructure, but more importantly in people; it invests not only in the future, but also takes good care of people's current needs.

A city that excels at making money gives people hope for opportunities; a city that is willing to spend generously for its residents is the one that people dare to entrust their lives to.

This article is from the WeChat official account "City War", written by Lao Qiao, and published with authorization from 36Kr.