Xuzhou
China's second-largest railway hub sits in the only low-elevation gap between four provinces—Xuzhou has controlled this junction since the Han dynasty, and its $125 billion economy still depends on being the place everything passes through.
Geography is destiny, and Xuzhou's destiny is traffic. The city sits in a gap in the Shandong Hills where the north-south Beijing-Shanghai axis crosses the east-west Eurasian Land Bridge corridor—a junction so strategically obvious that every Chinese dynasty since the Han has fought over it. Liu Bang, founder of the Han dynasty (206 BCE), was born here. The Battle of Huaihai (1948–49), with one million soldiers engaged, decided China's civil war on Xuzhou's plains.
The geographic logic is simple: Xuzhou controls the only low-elevation passage between four provinces (Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan, and Shandong). A canal built in the 2nd century BCE connected this gap to the Huai River system. The Grand Canal amplified it. The Tianjin-Pukou railway (1912) formalized it. Today, Xuzhou is China's second-largest railway hub, with high-speed rail placing both Beijing and Shanghai within two hours. Six directional corridors connect over 180 cities through Guanyin International Airport and a multimodal transport network of highway, rail, waterway, and pipeline.
This connectivity generates economic mass. Xuzhou's GDP reached 890 billion RMB (roughly $125 billion) in 2023, making it the largest economy in the Huaihai Economic Zone—a trans-provincial region of 20 cities that Xuzhou has anchored since 1986. Four pillar industries (machinery, building materials, chemicals, and food processing) rest on a coal heritage: the Jiawang Coal Mine opened in 1882, and Jiangsu's coal reserves—94% of which sit under Xuzhou—fed the city's early industrialization.
Xuzhou's position resembles a hub species in network ecology: remove it, and the connectivity of the entire regional ecosystem collapses. The city's challenge is converting pass-through traffic into resident economic value. Rail junctions generate logistics revenue, but the highest-margin industries—technology, finance, advanced manufacturing—cluster in Shanghai, Nanjing, and Suzhou. Xuzhou's two-hour proximity to everything makes it accessible but also makes everywhere else accessible from it.