Zhaoqing

The Greater Bay Area's largest city by land area is also its least developed — and that gap is exactly why China's EV industry chose it. Zhaoqing covers nearly 15,000 square kilometres of Guangdong's western reaches, more than any other mainland city in the eleven-city GBA, yet it has long ranked last among the nine mainland members for GDP per capita. What Zhaoqing offered instead was cheap land, deep-water river access, and proximity to Shenzhen and Guangzhou — the ingredients for rapid ecological succession in Chinese manufacturing.

When XPeng Motors opened its Zhaoqing factory in 2020, it triggered a preferential attachment cascade. In 2023, key supplier Bojun invested in a facility less than two kilometres from the plant and reached mass production within six months, delivering over 200,000 sets of body components. The Zhaoqing Hi-tech Industrial Development Zone now hosts more than 100 NEV and automotive parts companies spanning vehicle manufacturing, components, automotive electronics, safety systems, and lightweight materials.

Bamboo spreads through rhizome networks — underground connections that look like nothing from the surface until shoots appear everywhere at once. Zhaoqing's NEV cluster grew the same way: a root system of supply chain relationships funded by GBA capital and technology, invisible until the factory openings announced a new industrial landscape.

The facilitation runs both directions. The GBA's flagship cities — Shenzhen designing the technology, Guangzhou assembling the vehicles — facilitate Zhaoqing's industrialisation by providing demand and investment. Zhaoqing facilitates their expansion by providing the one resource they have exhausted: space. Extractive and heavy industries — gold mining, cement, aggregate quarrying — are being displaced by the same NEV manufacturing that Guangzhou and Foshan can no longer house.

Zhaoqing remains a work in progress. Its 4.1 million people produce less than one-quarter of the GDP generated by neighbouring Foshan, despite covering nearly four times the land area. But its position at the GBA's western edge makes it the corridor linking the delta to China's southwest, and the rhizome network is still spreading underground.