Chinese Cities of Opportunity 2025: Unlocking urban opportunities through New Quality Productive Forces

November 2025

Since its launch in 2014, the Chinese Cities of Opportunity report has tracked and supported the development of Chinese cities for 12 consecutive years, providing professional insights into their progress.

Over the two years since the term New Quality Productive Forces was introduced, the Chinese government and businesses have worked together to deepen the fusion of technological and industrial innovation. This collaboration has accelerated the shift towards high-end, intelligent, and green industries, forging a distinctive evolutionary path through enhanced productive factors, transformed business models, and the intelligent restructuring of industrial chains. Today, developing New Quality Productive Forces tailored to local conditions has not only become the core guidance for urban development but also drives cities to actively explore diverse new pathways for structural optimisation, the transformation of development drivers, quality enhancement, and green transition, injecting fresh vitality into Chinese urban development.

Precisely aligned with the trends of this era, this year’s Chinese Cities of Opportunity 2025 report focuses on the new advantages and opportunities arising from the development of New Quality Productive Forces. Drawing on 60 Chinese cities as its foundation, it innovatively constructs an evaluation system comprising 10 key observation dimensions and 50 variables. The report quantitatively presents the achievements of New Quality Productive Forces development in each city from a micro perspective, while also examining the distinctive pathways that different cities pursue by leveraging their unique endowments and differentiated development approaches. This report serves not only as a highly valuable reference for global markets seeking to understand the development of Chinese cities and identify cooperation opportunities but also provides an objective and quantitative foundation for cities to clearly recognise their development strengths and determine future directions, thereby offering strong support for the modernisation of Chinese cities.

This year marks a pivotal moment in the transformation of Chinese urban development. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council have recently jointly released the guideline on accelerating the transformation of urban development patterns and promoting high-quality urban development. The guideline clearly states that China will strive to forge a path of urban modernisation with Chinese characteristics, with strategic goals of significant progress in building modern, people-centred cities by 2030 and basic realisation by 2035. This top-level design not only provides clear direction for urban development but also draws greater global attention to the growth opportunities in Chinese cities.

To better convey these opportunities to the world, PwC has partnered for the first time with the Liaowang Institute, establishing an innovative cooperation model between an international professional services firm and a leading national think tank. This model enhances the collaborative impact of both parties in supporting the sustainable development of Chinese cities, while harnessing professional insights and authoritative influence to create a vital platform for highlighting cooperation opportunities in Chinese cities to a global audience. We hope that through this platform, the development achievements and growth potential of Chinese cities will be recognised by more international partners, facilitating the global sharing of China’s opportunities.