Liu Yangyang

    ar_yangz@163.com

    LONGHUA and Pingshan districts were officially established Saturday, which means they have been instituted with the full range of functions of the six other districts in Shenzhen.

    Though the physical sizes of Longhua and Pingshan remain unchanged, the two districts will have district-level legislative, political advisory and judicial organs like Futian, Nanshan, Luohu, Longgang, Bao’an and Yantian.

    Longhua District will have six subdistricts including Longhua, Dalang, Minzhi and Guanlan, while Pingshan District will have six subdistricts too.

    The upgrading of Pingshan New Area and Longhua New Area, which were approved by the State Council in October, will reduce the number of new areas in Shenzhen to two, namely Guangming and Dapeng new areas.

    At an inauguration ceremony, Shenzhen Party chief Xu Qin urged Longhua to focus on high-speed rail economy, high-end service and intelligent manufacturing in a drive to build it into a modern international innovation-oriented axis district.

    He expressed hope that Pingshan would grasp the opportunity of the city’s Going East Strategy and strive to make itself the center of eastern Shenzhen. The strategy is a plan aimed at refashioning the eastern part of the city, which is economically weaker than other parts, into a new growth point for a new takeoff of the Shenzhen economy.

    Longhua, covering an area of 175.58 square kilometers, is situated in the north of Shenzhen, lying on the central vertical axis of the city just north of the Futian CBD. Dongguan City borders it in the north.

    The district, which houses the Shenzhen North Railway Station, is one of the main production bases in Shenzhen. It consists of manufacturing, trading and information technology industries.

    Longhua now has a population of 1.43 million and its GDP in 2015 reached 163.6 billion yuan (US$24.38 billion), ranking top among the city’s four new areas and surpassing one-third of prefecture-level cities in Guangdong Province.

    Located in the northeastern part of Shenzhen, Pingshan District covers an area of 168 square kilometers and is next to Huizhou City in the east. With a population of 670,000, the district’s GDP exceeded 50 billion yuan last year.

    Pingshan, where world-famous automaker BYD is headquartered, boasts a national new-energy auto base, biological industry base and export-oriented processing base, as well as a provincial intelligent manufacturing demonstration base.

    Pingshan New Area and Long-hua New Area were established in 2009 and 2011 as part of the city’s effort to promote the integration of the former Shenzhen Special Economic Zone with Longgang and Bao’an districts.

    The management committees in the new areas were agencies dispatched by the Shenzhen Municipal Government and Shenzhen Party Committee of the CPC.

    The new areas didn’t have judicial and legislative organs to exercise powers. The election of deputies to the people’s congress, for example, was done by election committees in Longgang and Bao’an districts.