Xi'An
Ancient Silk Road terminus turned semiconductor hub — one Samsung plant quintupled Shaanxi's chip output and drives 70% of provincial trade.
Before Samsung built its ¥70 billion ($10 billion) memory chip plant here, Shaanxi province's entire integrated circuit output was worth ¥10 billion. Within four years it hit ¥50 billion, and the number of semiconductor companies grew from 60 to over 200. That single factory now drives 70% of the province's import and export volume. Xi'an — once known as Chang'an, the eastern terminus of the Silk Road and capital of thirteen Chinese dynasties — has become a case study in how one industrial transplant can restructure an entire regional economy.
The city's strategic value has been continuous for over 3,000 years. The Zhou, Qin, Han, and Tang dynasties all ruled from here, making it the world's most frequently chosen capital. The Terracotta Warriors buried nearby were guarding a city that was already the largest on earth when Rome was still a republic. When the Tang dynasty fell in 907 AD, Xi'an lost its capital status and spent a millennium in relative decline — but it never lost its geographic logic: a walled basin at the intersection of China's east-west and north-south transport corridors.
That geography made Xi'an the natural starting point for China's Belt and Road Initiative. The Xi'an International Trade and Logistics Park now functions as an inland port, with freight trains running direct to Hamburg. The city has positioned itself as the new Silk Road's innovation capital, hosting the Global Hard and Core Technology Innovation Conference and building industrial chains in aerospace, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. Its high-tech zone, established in 1991, specialises in military-civilian integration — a direct descendant of the Third Front factories planted here in the 1960s.
With roughly 13 million residents, Xi'an is growing faster than most eastern Chinese cities, pulling talent from across the northwest. But the Samsung dependency reveals a structural vulnerability: when a single foreign company accounts for the majority of a province's trade, the ecosystem is not diversified — it is concentrated. This is keystone-species dynamics: Samsung's Xi'an plant plays the same role as a top predator in a food web. Remove it, and the 200+ supplier companies that grew around it face cascade failure.