This unidentified photo shows the Canton Tower in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region's foreign trade volume grew at an average year-on-year 6.1 percent rate over the past 25 years, playing a role in helping to maintain the SAR's stability and prosperity.
As the provincial government has given the green light to establish the China Guangdong Pilot Free Trade Zone Interactive Development Zones in 13 prefecture-level cities in the province, one of the major production bases in the world, the director-general of the Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Commerce, said that trade between Guangdong and Hong Kong would continue to grow in the months to come.
Guangdong now has three pilot FTZ areas in the cities of Nansha, Shenzhen's Qianhai and Zhuhai's Hengqin.
Zhang said at a news conference in Guangzhou on Tuesday that the provincial government will promote investment and trade facilitation in the interactive development zones and further expand cooperation between Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao.
He said that the province's free trade zones have played a role in promoting the high-quality development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, as well as deepening reform and opening-up in previous years.
According to Zhang, the FTZ areas have generated tax revenue of more than 100 billion yuan, foreign trade volume of around 2 trillion yuan and attracted actual offshore investment worth more than 55 billion yuan since their establishment in 2015.
Guangdong's foreign trade volume with Hong Kong reached four times more than the figure recorded in 1997 when Hong Kong returned to the motherland, Guangdong Customs said in a statement.
The export commodities structure of Guangdong to Hong Kong has been optimized over the last 25 years, with the export of high-tech products to Hong Kong increasing, said the statement.
Guangdong's exports to Hong Kong have changed from traditional labor-intensive products to electromechanical products with relatively high added value, thanks to the province's rapid development of the electronic manufacturing industry over the past decades, the statement said.
Guangdong's export of mechanical and electrical products to Hong Kong, which accounted for 30.1 percent of the province's total exports to Hong Kong in 1997, rose at an annual growth rate of 11.2 percent over the same period to reach 82.1 percent in 2021.
Guangdong's new and high-tech products exported to Hong Kong saw an annual growth rate of 17.2 percent between 1997 and 2021, and the proportion went from 6.6 percent in 1997 to 63 percent last year.