As a major industrial and manufacturing province in East China, Shandong boasts solid industrial foundations to sharpen its core regional competitiveness.

Against this backdrop, Governor Zhou Naixiang outlined the province's development blueprint for the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-30), noting that Shandong will speed up the construction of a pilot zone for green, low-carbon and high-quality growth, foster a new highland of high-standard opening-up, and strive to emerge as a vital economic growth engine in northern China.

Central to this vision is the industrial capacity upgrading initiative laid out in the outline of Shandong's 15th Five-Year Plan, which zeroes in on three core development tracks: emerging industries, future industries and digital and intelligent industries.

To start with, Shandong has built a robust pipeline of emerging sectors set to become the mainstay of its local economy. The output value of its high-end equipment and information technology sectors each exceeds 1 trillion yuan ($146.8 billion), while the new materials and biomedicine sectors account for roughly one-tenth of their respective national market sizes.

Sun Aijun, head of the Shandong Development and Reform Commission, added that the province will allocate concentrated resources to these competitive sectors to cultivate 50 distinctive industrial clusters, so as to expand the scale and lift the overall quality of emerging industries.

For the long-term strategic competition, capturing opportunities in future industries is equally essential, and Shandong has already taken proactive measures to seize the upper hand. Three dedicated pilot zones for future industries have been established in Jinan, Qingdao and Yantai to advance research and breakthroughs in cutting-edge fields.

Digital and intelligent transformation stands as another key pillar for cementing lasting competitive strengths, to which the outline devotes an entire chapter with elaborate implementation plans.

To accelerate relevant progress, Shandong will integrate various policy funds and industrial investment vehicles to support around 100 key provincial-level digital industrial projects every year. It will also launch 366 demonstration artificial intelligence application scenarios to inject robust digital and intelligent impetus into regional economic growth.

Over the past five years, Shandong has fully delivered all its 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) development targets, registering remarkable progress in its economic development. The province's GDP achieved an average annual growth rate of 5.9 percent, 0.5 percentage points above the national average.

Parallel progress can be seen in the profound optimization of Shandong's industrial structure. The share of high-tech industrial output in total industrial output climbed from 45.1 percent in 2020 to 55.7 percent in 2025.

Governor Zhou emphasized that sci-tech innovation remains at the core of Shandong's overall development strategy, boosting its regional innovation capacity into the country's top tier. To sustain this momentum, the provincial government has poured more than 70 billion yuan into science and technology over the past five years.

A comprehensive system of high-caliber innovation platforms supports this investment. The Laoshan Laboratory, China's national marine science lab, operates at full capacity, while Shandong hosts 36 national key labs, three national technological innovation centers and 11 provincial labs.

Thanks to consistent policy support, Shandong attracted more than 1 million young professionals last year, turning the province into a magnet for innovators, entrepreneurs and skilled workers from across the country.