Ningbo’s bay ports punch above their provincial weight
Ningbo is a sub-provincial city in northeastern Zhejiang, China, spanning urban districts, satellite cities, rural counties, and Hangzhou Bay islands. It is the southern economic center of the Yangtze Delta’s south wing, separated from Shanghai by the bay, with 2022 GDP about CNY 1.57 trillion.
Ningbo sits in northeastern Zhejiang and governs six urban districts, two county-level satellite cities and two rural counties, including islands in Hangzhou Bay and the East China Sea. Hangzhou Bay separates it from Shanghai to the north; Zhoushan lies offshore to the east, and Shaoxing and Taizhou border it to the west and south. The 2020 census counted 9,404,283 people in its territory. Its name combines characters for serene and wave, and its short form, Yong, comes from a coastal hill and the river running through the city.
History runs deep. The Jingtou Mountain culture dates to 6300 BCE and the Hemudu culture to 4800 BCE. Under the Tang dynasty, from 636 CE, the city was called Mingzhou, after its two walled-in lakes, Sun Lake and Moon Lake; Sun Lake dried up in the 19th century and restoration began in 2002. Ningbo's merchants were active on the Silk Road more than two millennia ago, and its Ayuwang Temple held one of the most revered Ashokan stupas in China. In 1842 it became one of the first five treaty ports opened to the West, and in 2016 China, Japan and Korea named it an East Asian City of Culture.
The combined port of Ningbo-Zhoushan is the world's busiest by cargo tonnage and has been the third-busiest container port since 2010. Ningbo is one of 15 sub-provincial cities and one of five separate state-planning cities, with Dalian, Qingdao, Xiamen and Shenzhen, giving it provincial-level freedom over economic and financial policy rather than answering to Zhejiang.
Its 2022 output reached about CNY 1.57 trillion, twelfth among 293 Chinese cities, and in 2020 it ranked eighth for average disposable income. More than 100 listed companies had headquarters or registered offices there by 2020, it had the seventh most listed firms of any Chinese city in 2021, and it appears among the world's top 100 research cities in the Nature Index.
Source: Ningbo
