Jiangsu province has been striving to foster a market-oriented and world-class business environment that abides by the law for more companies and talents, said an official from the province in Beijing on Tuesday.

The environment will encourage the State-owned, private and foreign companies to operate, create and invest, said Zhang Aijun, head of the Publicity Department of CPC Jiangsu provincial committee, at a media conference on Tuesday evening held during the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

Jiangsu has attracted more than $240 billion of foreign investment in the past 10 years, accounting for more than 17 percent of the country's total, Zhang said.

"In eight of the past 10 years, Jiangsu ranked first among all provinces in utilization of foreign capital".

In 2021, the GDP of Jiangsu increased to 11.64 trillion yuan ($1.61 trillion) and it surpassed the World Bank's income threshold for high-income countries as its per capita GDP reached 137,000 yuan.

The added value of the manufacturing industry reached 4.2 trillion yuan, which accounted for 36 percent of last year's GDP.

According to Zhang, the manufacturing industry has laid a solid foundation for the province's high-quality development, which has become a distinctive feature of the economic hub.

Jiangsu has established 85 major industrial projects with investments of more than 10 billion yuan each, 205 projects of more than 5 billion yuan each and 32,000 high-tech companies in the past 10 years, he said.

"In the past five years, we have shut down 57,000 polluting companies and asked more than 4,700 chemical companies that failed to meet safety and environmental protection standards to withdraw from the industry," added Zhang.