As trade war tensions between Washington and Beijing flare intermittently, China is redrawing its economic map—and placing bold new bets far from its bustling coasts. At the centre of this strategic rebalancing lies Guizhou, a mountainous province in Southwest China once known more for its poverty than prosperity.
Now, Guizhou is emerging as a key pillar of China’s domestic economic security plan, envisioned as a bulwark against external risks and supply chain vulnerabilities exposed by the US tariff offensive.
This transformation is no accident. With the 2026–2030 Five-Year Plan underway, China is moving to deepen its industrial and digital base inland, tapping into provinces like Guizhou to anchor a new economic geography—one less reliant on coastal exports and more focused on internal circulation.
Only a few years ago, Guizhou was a centrepiece of President Xi Jinping’s anti-poverty campaign. Having officially eradicated absolute poverty by 2020, the province has now been drafted into a far more ambitious project: serving as a strategic hinterland in China’s trade war playbook.
“We must fully play up our comparative advantages to serve the national strategy,” Guizhou party chief Xu Lin said at a planning conference in May 2025. It’s a vision backed by Beijing’s top brass, including President Xi himself, who visited the province in March to endorse its role as a national industrial backup zone.
The idea harks back to the Cold War-era "Third Line" initiative, when China shifted critical industries inland amid tensions with the Soviet Union. Guizhou, along with its neighbours in the mountainous west, was once again deemed vital for national security.
In 2024, Guizhou’s GDP grew 5.3 percent placing it 22nd among China’s 31 provinces but signalling significant progress from its formerly marginal status.
Guizhou’s shift into the spotlight is being guided by the `Greater Hinterland Strategy', a proposal by the Beijing-based Pangoal Institution that groups 10 inland provinces into a unified economic zone. The goal: reduce China’s exposure to external shocks and build new growth engines.
“It’s a proactive strategic choice,” said the think tank, which calls for central government enterprises and major corporations to invest in infrastructure, national labs and industrial capacity in these less-developed regions.
Guizhou, they argue, offers cost advantages, mineral resources, and growing industrial capabilities—especially if governance and business conditions continue to improve.
Ding Shuang, an economist at Standard Chartered Bank, sees the shift as part of China’s `bottom line thinking' on economic and national security. “As security is a topic that cannot be ignored, the backup of certain industries is necessary,” he noted.
However, others are sceptical. “Coastal infrastructure is far superior for export and domestic integration,” said Derek Scissors of China Beige Book. “It may be more effective to move people inland to the coast, rather than industries inland.”
Guizhou is betting that its emerging strengths—in infrastructure and digital technology—will tip the scale.
Over the past two decades, the province has built dozens of record-breaking bridges and transport links to better integrate with the national economy. The soon-to-be-completed Huajiang Grand Canyon bridge will become the world’s highest, towering 625 metres above the gorge below.
But even more transformative has been Guizhou’s ascent in the digital economy. It has quietly become a national leader in data storage, cloud computing and industrial applications. According to provincial officials, digital services now account for half of Guizhou’s GDP, outpacing every other province in digital growth for nine consecutive years.
Major tech firms including Apple, Huawei and Tencent have invested in data centres here, and the province now hosts one-quarter of the computing power for China’s `Eastern Data, Western Compute' initiative—a massive push to shift digital workloads inland.
Beyond data, Guizhou is also part of Beijing’s push to create industrial “backup zones” to shield the country from technological decoupling and supply disruptions.
One such project appears to be forming in Anshun, a city with historical ties to China’s Cold War defence industry. Reports suggest the area may become a hub for aviation components, feeding into the supply chain of state-backed aircraft manufacturer Comac—a direct target of US export restrictions on engine technology.
By June 2025, Guizhou had already signed 298 industrial relocation deals with coastal regions, of which 190 have commenced operations. The projects, worth a combined $36.5 billion, span sectors from advanced manufacturing to traditional industries like textiles and food processing.
At a recent investment promotion event, Guizhou officials pitched the province as `a land of opportunity' to dozens of entrepreneurs, noting its potential as a low-cost, strategically located production base.
Geographically, Guizhou straddles two major economic zones—the Greater Bay Area to the southeast and the Chengdu-Chongqing belt to the north—making it a natural node in Beijing’s broader efforts to knit together western provinces with strategic infrastructure.
The West China Land and Sea Corridor, for instance, aims to connect Guizhou to Southeast Asia via new rail and port links through the Beibu Gulf.
Meanwhile, the Five-Year Plan calls on Guizhou to become a national leader in six strategic sectors, including new energy materials, computing resources and even traditional Chinese liquor.
For all its past struggles, Guizhou’s future is now entwined with China’s response to the deepening rift with the US. While debates continue about the feasibility of inland industrialisation, Beijing’s intent is clear: resilience will no longer be built only along the coast.
Guizhou’s rise reflects a broader shift in China’s development model—one that blends national security, digital power, and decentralised industrial strategy into a new vision of economic modernisation.
As the global trade landscape becomes more unpredictable, China is placing long-term bets—and Guizhou, once its poorest province, is now one of its biggest.
