Economic Pattern of China’s Different Regions and Trade Between Them

China is a vast land where natural resources and factors of production (including labor and capital) vary between regions. These, together with considerable difference in each region’s industrial strengths due to historical and policy reasons, have led to the spatial distribution of the industries as we see today. Figure 1.1 shows how the four regions contributed to the value-added of the three sectors—primary, secondary and tertiary—in selected years from 1978, the year when the reform and opening up policy was launched, to 2015. The secondary sector is further divided into manufacturing and construction. According to the definitions of the National Bureau of Statistics, the whole country consists of four regions—the east, the west, the central and the northeast. The ten eastern provinces (municipalities) include Hebei, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Shandong, Guangdong, Hainan, Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. In the central region lie the six provinces of Shanxi, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan, Hubei and Hunan. Inner Mongolia, Guangxi, Chongqing, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Tibet, Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, and Xinjiang are in the west. The three northeast provinces are Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang.