ZHENGZHOU, Dec 13 : A group of foreign journalists visited Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone (ZAEZ) to witness logistic dynamics of the “Four Port Linkages” and the opening up landscape of the “Four Silk Roads.”
During their in-depth visit, the journalists from Pakistan, South Korea, Ireland, Türkiye and other countries
also explored the intelligent upgrading of advanced manufacturing and the experience of the industrial transformation in a traditional inland region.
They were briefed that Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone also commonly known as ZAEZ, located in Henan Province in central China, is the nation’s only state-level experimental zone for the airport economy approved by the State
Council of China and it also serves as the pilot zone for the Zhengzhou-Luxembourg “Air Silk Road.
Operating with the administrative authority of a prefecture-level city, the ZAEZ bears the critical
mission of expanding high-level opening-up in inland China and driving the Central Plains to integrate into the domestic-international “dual circulation” development paradigm.
To this end, ZAEZ has adopted a core strategy centered on “Hub + Opening-Up.” It solidifies its foundation through the “Four-Port Linkage” which are integrating the airport, railway port, highway port, and seaport and expands its global reach via the “Four Silk Roads” including air, land, digital, and maritime). These two pillars reinforce and complement each other, providing solid support for Henan’s in-depth integration into the dual circulation.
Since its approval in 2013, ZAEZ has evolved from an “airport town” of under 20 square kilometers into an “Aerotropolis” spanning 747 square kilometers with a population of 800,000.
Today, its hub advantages stand as a benchmark for inland regions: Zhengzhou Airport has launched 64 all-cargo air routes, covering over 30 countries and regions worldwide. Leveraging the Zhengzhou-Luxembourg “dual-hub” strategy, China-Europe
Railway Express trains departing from ZAEZ can reach Europe in 15 days. The multi-modal transport system integrating air, railway, highway, and maritime services gifted landlocked Henan with world-class logistics capabilities connecting it to the globe.
ZAEZ is a hub for emerging industries such as modern logistics, electronic information, new energy vehicles (NEVs), and biomedicine. The electronic information industry has achieved an annual output value exceeding RMB 500 billion for three consecutive years: Loongson Technology, a leading domestic CPU enterprise, has deployed 300 Loongson servers and
nearly 4,000 Loongson terminals; the Henan Airport Intelligent Computing Center, the largest of its kind in central China, empowers industries with computing power and large-model agents.
The New Energy Vehicles or NEV industry has emerged as a new growth engine: BYD’s manufacturing
base in ZAEZ produces a vehicle rolling off the production line every 50 seconds, propelling
Henan into the top 10 NEV-producing provinces in China, with a 100-billion-yuan automobile city taking shape. Emerging formats such as cross-border e-commerce with annual transactions exceeding RMB 25.8 billion and micro-drama creative bases are thriving.
In the first three quarters of this year, ZAEZ achieved a regional GDP of RMB 121.33 billion, a year-on-year increase of 11.1%, 5.5 percentage points higher than the provincial average.
