Anshun

Anshun sells waterfalls to tourists, but the city's deeper logic is aerospace redundancy. Set 1,374 metres up in Guizhou and home to about 765,313 people in its urban core, Anshun is usually introduced through Huangguoshu, the giant waterfall west of the city. That tourism story is real. It is also incomplete.

Anshun's own government says the city has Guizhou's most complete aviation industry system and the capacity to develop and manufacture complete aircraft. That industrial skeleton was not an accident of the market. It grew from decades of inland defence dispersion, when mountain cities were valuable precisely because they were harder to hit and easier to hide. The pattern still shows in the numbers: CEIC, citing the Anshun Municipal Bureau of Statistics, reports city GDP of ¥118.611 billion ($16.4 billion) in 2024, and the industrial base keeps looking for civilian uses rather than waiting for old military logic to run out.

That is why the city's 2025 partnership with EHang matters. The company said Guizhou Scenic ordered 50 EH216-S aircraft and signed a cooperation agreement with Anshun's economic and technological development zone to build low-altitude cultural tourism. Read one way, that sounds like a tourism upgrade. Read another way, it is a factory city trying to make its historic aviation habitat pay twice: once through manufacturing capability, and again through scenic flights, testing, and a local supply chain.

Biologically, Anshun behaves like a bat colony in karst country. The caves and cliffs provide shelter, but the real advantage comes from the navigation system built inside the shelter. Path dependence explains why aviation stayed. Redundancy explains why the state wanted aircraft capacity inland instead of only on the coast. Niche construction explains the current move: using an old defence-industrial base to create a new low-altitude tourism economy around Anshun and Guiyang.