Nanshan rises as hardware innovation hub

SHENZHEN — When a Chinese robotics innovator faced an urgent space crunch for his laser sensor startup a few years ago, he did what many entrepreneurs in the country's southern tech hub of Shenzhen, Guangdong province, do — he called the local government.

By the next day, multiple authorities responded. Within three months, Qiu Chunxin's RoboSense was moved into a new facility. Today, the tech firm born of his doctoral research is a publicly listed leader in LiDAR technology, with its sensors acting as the "eyes" for a new generation of autonomous machines.

What happened in between wasn't just a startup success story. It was a rapid trajectory of how a small district in Shenzhen — specifically a 10-kilometer stretch of asphalt known as Liuxian Avenue — has become the world's most concentrated ecosystem for hardware innovation, driven by the city's dense, readily available industrial chain and handson government incubation policies.

Vital district

The strip's output is impressive. In 2025, the GDP of Nanshan district exceeded 1 trillion yuan ($144 billion).

At this year's CES in Las Vegas, the geographic advantage was unmistakable. Of roughly 4,100 exhibitors, approximately 380 came from Shenzhen; more than 100 from Nanshan alone, with at least 65 clustered along the Liuxian corridor, also known as "Robot Valley".

Its model is not quite Silicon Valley, which long ago outsourced its manufacturing; nor is it Austin, Texas, whose tech boom relies on luring cost-sensitive refugees from San Francisco. Startups stay not because it's cheap, but because leaving means exiling themselves from the ecosystem. They benefit from the speed afforded by proximity.

Logic of density

Nanshan, where China's first open industrial zone, Shekou, was founded, marks the start of the country's opening-up policy and serves as an early incubator for its high-tech manufacturing sector. Since then, this densely packed district has fostered more than 6,000 national high-tech enterprises, including 394 specialized and sophisticated "little giant" firms.

Facing severe land constraints, Nanshan even pioneered an "Industrial Upstairs" initiative, stacking factories vertically in multi-story buildings. This concentration creates a "same-day closed-loop" supply chain, in which all stages, from prototyping to assembly, occur within a single geographic hub on a single day.

The mountain-flanked valley's layout itself accelerates innovation: local campuses like Tsinghua and Harbin Institute of Technology face directly onto industrial parks and corporate headquarters. Joint university-corporate labs enable seamless lab-to-industry translation, turning this compressed geography into a "petri dish" where future industries are cultivated at pace.

Helping hand

Nanshan local officials describe their role as providing an "invisible string" that ties the ecosystem together, rather than picking winners. Their approach is described in a maxim: no disturbance, but always responsive to requests.

The government provides startups with a bundled package that includes a workspace, early-stage funding and expedited regulatory approvals — all in one offering.

"This policy package is more precisely tailored to serve startups with technological breakthroughs, sustained research and development investment and broad commercial prospects," said Liu Jingkang, founder of Insta360. This Nanshan-based hardware maker's panoramic camera became an instant US hit, with customers lining up at dawn to grab the new release.

Last December, the national venture capital guidance fund was launched in China. Among the three regional funds under its guidance, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Fund was registered and established in Nanshan, with a target scale of 50.45 billion yuan. The fund follows early-stage, small-scale, long-term investments in hard technology.

As evening traffic thickens along the avenue, engineers inside Nanshan's industrial parks are still huddled over prototypes. In an era defined by technological upheaval, this sense of urgency reflects China's broader ambition.

Xinhua - China Daily