Fangchenggang city, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region is the only city in China connected to the ASEAN by sea, land and river. It is China's gateway into the ASEAN.

Officially recognized in March 1968, Fangchenggang once occupied an area of just 14.7 square meters. However, over the past 50 years it has expanded to over 6,200 square kilometers, due in large part to port construction.  

An aerial shot of Fangchenggang. [Photo/cri.cn]

A new industrial port city has been built within the city. The port is well-regarded both at home and abroad and various economic indicators have placed it at the forefront of the region for several consecutive years. The per capita GDP in the region has surpassed $10,000.

Fangchenggang has already built 41 berths with a capacity of over 10,000 metric tons and three berths with a capacity of 200,000 tons. It is open to traffic and has more than 250 ports in over 100 countries and regions. It has processed more than 100 million tons of cargo since 2012, and in 2017 it constituted 47.3 percent of the total port throughput in Guangxi.

A wharf in Fangchenggang. [Photo/fcgs.gov.cn]

A number of Fortune 500 companies and China's top 500 enterprises have set up operations in the city, forming a modern port industrial cluster focusing on steel, non-ferrous metal, energy, grain, oil, petrochemicals and equipment manufacturing. The area is now home to China's largest vegetable oilseed processing center and phosphate export processing center.

Since the beginning of the year, the city has opened cold chain freight train routes to Beijing, Shenyang, Jinan, Chongqing and Shanghai and pioneered the ASEAN seafood cold chain sea-highway-railway transportation system in China, becoming an important base for the China-ASEAN cold chain economy, a regional cold chain logistics hub, and a bulk cargo trading center.

The city's land border is 230 kilometers long and has five national first-class ports. Dongxing Port is one of the main entry and exit ports in coastal China. This year, the number of vessels passing through Dongxing Port exceeded 10 million, ranking first among China's border ports.

Fangchenggang has a number of State-level "development" and "open" platforms, such as the Guangxi Dongxing National Key Development and Open Experimental Zone and the China-Vietnam Cross-border Economic Cooperation Zone, which is also a pilot city for the construction of a new open economy system. This year, the city received permission to build a bonded logistics center (type B).

In recent years, the city's personal cross-border trade RMB settlement, border tourism remote business certification, commercial system reform and cross-border labor cooperation have become a model for the region and even the country as a whole, creating the country's first ASEAN currency service platform and first cross-border insurance service center.