Strategic Bay Planning: A New Growth Lever for China’s Marine Economy
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China is reshaping its marine development strategy by focusing on integrated, bay-based planning, an approach designed to improve coordination across coastal regions while supporting sustainable economic growth.
With more than 18,000 kilometers of coastline and hundreds of bays, areas such as Bohai Bay, Hangzhou Bay, and the Beibu Gulf have long functioned as dense nodes of industry, logistics, urban development, and maritime heritage. These bays also concentrate critical coastal ecosystems, making them natural units for aligning economic activity with environmental capacity.
Rather than managing land and sea separately, the new framework treats each major bay as a single economic and ecological system, enabling more coherent spatial planning, infrastructure deployment, and industrial clustering. The goal is to reduce fragmentation, improve efficiency, and create clearer development pathways for both public and private stakeholders.
China's marine economy has grown large enough that productivity and coordination now matter more than simple expansion. In the first three quarters of 2025, the country's gross ocean product reached 7.9 trillion yuan, up 5.6 percent year on year, reinforcing its role as a stabilizing force in coastal and national growth.
Bay-level integration is expected to address long-standing challenges such as overlapping land use, uneven industrial upgrading, and bottlenecks in ports, logistics, and coastal infrastructure—issues common to mature maritime economies worldwide.
TWO
Future gains are expected to come from technology-driven upgrading rather than volume growth. Priority areas include marine engineering, advanced materials, digital ocean technologies, and a new generation of strategic industries, notably:
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Seawater desalination and integrated water solutions
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Marine biomedicine and bio-based products
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Marine renewable energy, including offshore wind and tidal systems
Clearer bay-wide planning also improves investment visibility. More defined industrial layouts and infrastructure roadmaps are likely to attract private capital, including through sector-focused funds and long-term partnerships, particularly in technology, equipment, and environmental services.
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Coastal bays face rising exposure to climate risks, extreme weather, and ecological stress. Integrated planning allows disaster prevention, shoreline protection, and ecosystem restoration to be embedded into economic development, rather than treated as afterthoughts.
Internationally, this bay-centered approach mirrors practices in other major coastal economies—from Tokyo Bay to the North Sea—where place-based planning has become central to balancing competitiveness with resilience.
For global businesses, the shift signals more predictable development patterns, deeper industrial clustering, and expanding demand for advanced marine, environmental, and digital solutions—positioning China's major bays as increasingly comprehensive marine economic platforms.
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