Nanshan district in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, is showing how technological innovation can lead to economic growth — even with limited resources — and turn it into a sustainable driver of development.

Li Xiaoning, head of Nanshan district, recently announced that the district had surpassed the 1 trillion yuan ($143.7 billion) GDP benchmark for the first time last year to reach more than 1.01 trillion yuan.

A handful of others have done the same. In 2018, the GDP of Shanghai's Pudong New Area exceeded 1 trillion yuan. In 2022, Beijing's Haidian district joined the club. Unlike Shenzhen, however, Beijing and Shanghai are both directly administered by the central government.

The most noteworthy aspect of Shenzhen's achievement may not be the trillion-yuan figure itself but the speed at which the milestone was reached. It has been described by a scholar as "an elephant running as fast as a leopard". It took 15 years for Nanshan's GDP to reach 100 billion yuan in 2005 — up from 7.8 billion yuan in 1990. Then, it rose from 652.7 billion yuan in 2020 to last year's 1 trillion yuan, said Li, the district head.

Nanshan's economic growth rate in 2025 reached 6.3 percent, outperforming the national average of 5 percent, Guangdong's average of 3.9 percent and Shenzhen's average of 5.5 percent. Despite covering only a relatively small area of 185 square kilometers, or about one-tenth that of Shenzhen, Nanshan contributes roughly one-fourth of the city's GDP, significantly bolstering its reputation as the "Silicon Valley of China".

Nanshan, which is home to Chinese tech giants such as Tencent and ZTE Corp, as well as drone manufacturer DJI and humanoid robot maker UBTECH, has maintained a strong growth momentum since its establishment. Shenzhen, the booming city neighboring Hong Kong where Nanshan is located, is often considered a pioneer of reform and opening-up.

Guo Wanda, executive vice-president of the Shenzhen-based China Development Institute, said, "Nanshan owes its success to its strong scientific and technological innovation, as well as to the rapid development of emerging industries in the new economy." Guo said that the district has attracted many excellent and large enterprises, as well as a number of talented people, due to its concentration of high-level innovation.

He added that the most economically developed areas worldwide have broken through their growth ceilings by enhancing their innovation capacity and upgrading their industrial structures — such as New York, London and Singapore.

With 218 listed companies, Nanshan rivals some provincial-level regions. The number of national high-tech enterprises exceeds 6,000. By 2025, the number of invention patents per 10,000 residents had risen to over 860, which is about 22.9 times the national average.

Sixty percent of Nanshan's GDP comes from strategic emerging industries. Xiang Tianye, director of Nanshan's industry and information technology bureau, said the district now has more than 20 companies that can produce complete robots, as well as more than 200 upstream and downstream enterprises.

At UBTECH, a newly developed hot-swappable autonomous battery system for humanoid robots prevents mission interruptions caused by downtime for charging, while also boosting overall production efficiency. As of the end of last year, orders for the company's humanoid robots had reached nearly 1.4 billion yuan.

"We put forward our requirements in the morning, and the parts can be machined and ready for rapid verification as quickly as the same afternoon," said Jiao Jichao, the company's vice-president.