Yangtze River Stories (10) Chemical enterprises along Yangtze River Economic Belt eye industrial transformation

What used to be a chemical workshop on the bank of the Yangtze River is now a lush green industrial park.

Under the call of green development, Yichang City in central China’s Hubei province has upgraded its chemical enterprises, boosting industrial transformation in the Yangtze River Economic Belt and strengthening green development.

The city has not only shut down, transformed, or relocated chemical enterprises—proposing a no chemical factory zone within one kilometer of the Yangtze River by 2020, but is also promoting industrial upgrading and green development, which is also beneficial to both companies and the local environment.

For example, a glass manufacturer has recently occupied the international high-end market of 0.2mm ultra-thin glass after investing 54.5 million yuan in industrial supply chain upgrading.

Such measures have had a positive effect. The local economy saw 80.2 percent of its economic revenue come from the non-chemical sector, and the city has had more blue sky days, registering good or standard air quality days 70.2 percent of the time from January to June, up 6.1 percentage points, while the standard rate of provincial water quality checks was 97.62 percent, the Economic Daily reported.

Covering 11 provincial regions, the Yangtze River Economic Belt accommodates a population of over 600 million people, and generates more than 40 percent of the country’s GDP. And intensive development has taken its toll on China’s mother river over the past years.

During his visit in 2018 to a high-tech company in Wuhan, Hubei Province, a focal point in the economic belt, President Xi Jinping put emphasis on green development and called for supply-side structural reform and environmental recovery, Xinhua reported.

By 2030, the Yangtze River Economic Belt is expected to become a pioneer for the industrial upgrading of the whole country, Xinhua reported, citing the National Development and Reform Commission.

(Wang Tianhao contributed to the story)