Jiangmen’s 15th Five-Year Plan: Where the Region Says It Is Going Next

Every emigrant region is eventually described by the people who left it. The Wuyi counties of Guangdong (五邑, Wǔyì) — the five-county qiaoxiang (侨乡, qiáoxiāng, the emigrant homeland) Jiangmen administers — have spent most of the past century being explained from outside: in remittance letters, in lineage books, in museum cases. In 2026 the direction reversed. The prefecture entered its fifteenth five-year plan, 十五五 (shíwǔwǔ), covering 2026 to 2030: the region’s own official statement of where it says it is going next, written for an economy it wants its people back in.

The targets are specific: 6 percent average annual growth, organised around an industrial shorthand the city calls “13158”; two cross-sea bridges that opened in 2024; a science bet on a dual-carbon laboratory; and an invitation to overseas-Chinese investment (侨资, qiáozī) routed through 侨梦苑 (qiáoméngyuàn, Qiaomengyuan). Underneath sits a trend the region’s own records push back on: an overseas-capital flow that, in the city gazetteer’s series, peaked in the early 1980s. What follows is checkable — the targets, the numbers behind them, and which of them a reader can verify.

One disclosure first. The plan layer here is 2026-vintage: government documents, official media interpretations, a statistical bulletin. The books carrying the deeper history reach a 2024 base year or close at 2000. This article keeps those vintages apart and labels every city-reported figure.

§1 The Clock: A 2035 Ladder, a 2026 Start

The clock was set seven years before the plan existed. The Outline Development Plan for the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (《粤港澳大湾区发展规划纲要》, 2019) set a two-step target: the bay area’s framework “basically formed” (基本形成) by 2022, full establishment (全面建成) by 2035.

Read against that ladder, Jiangmen’s fifteenth five-year plan is the first plan of the completion stage. Its rail commitments and one-hour living-circle language are 2035 deliverables pulled forward, not ambitions invented for this cycle.

The anchors are plain. The plan, 《江门市国民经济和社会发展第十五个五年规划纲要》, was approved by the sixteenth municipal people’s congress and printed by the municipal government; the city’s own published interpretation is the readable version. The 2026 government work report was delivered on 5 February 2026 by mayor 吴晓晖 (Wú Xiǎohuī). 2026 is year one, and the plan describes itself in three phrases — its language, not this article’s: an advanced-manufacturing base for Guangdong (广东先进制造业基地, xiānjìn zhìzàoyè jīdì), a new growth pole for the Greater Bay Area (粤港澳大湾区新增长极, xīn zēngzhǎngjí), a river-and-sea gateway on the coastal belt (沿海经济带上的江海门户, jiānghǎi ménhù). Above them, the 2035 rung: output doubled against 2022. A neutrino detector sits 700 metres under Kaiping. Jiangmen is the gate through which the Wuyi counties are entered.

§2 The Target and the Base

Jiangmen’s 2025 GDP was ¥429.39bn — 4293.91亿元 on the statistical bulletin’s preliminary count — up 2.8 percent, published jointly by the city statistics bureau and the National Bureau of Statistics field team, and seventh in the province. Southern Daily’s report of the five-year result rounds the year to ¥429.4bn.

Across the fourteenth five-year plan (十四五, shísìwǔ, 2021–2025) GDP grew at an average of 4.7 percent a year — the province’s fourth-highest five-year average, on the city’s own summary — while the single year 2025 booked 2.8 percent. The rank attaches to the average.

Against that base the city targets 6 percent average annual growth — a five-year average goal, distinct from the plan’s first-year figure of “around 5 percent” for 2026, the annual figure set alongside sub-targets for industrial output, investment, retail sales, trade and revenue. The plan targets; it does not promise.

On income per head the bulletin gives a level and no rank: ¥88,983, or US$12,458, up 2.7 percent. No 2025 per-capita ranking appears in the sources reviewed, so none is stated here.

The ambition is written as ambition: the city’s shorthand is 万亿工业强市 (wànyì gōngyè qiángshì, “trillion-yuan industrial powerhouse”), and the draft industrialisation plan aims at ¥1trn of industrial gross output by 2030 — “到2030年，工业总产值力争达到1万亿元”. One phrase that circulates, “sprinting for ¥600bn” (冲刺6000亿), was not located in the fifteenth-plan text and is not attributed to it.

The city has also put the gap in writing: 对比”十五五”时期需要实现的主要经济目标，江门目前还存在较大差距 — measured against the main targets the plan has to reach, Jiangmen still has a considerable distance to go.

Target and base, on one page

Every cell is city-reported or from the 2025 statistical bulletin. The R&D cell is arithmetic from two confirmed figures, not a published percentage.

§3 What “13158” Is — And How Much of It Is Jiangmen’s Own

The label has a named author and a date. “13158” was introduced publicly by the mayor in 2026, reported as 26 January, at an open session of the city’s delegation to the provincial people’s congress; the authoritative enumeration is the 2026 government work report, which the city’s media summarised as 何为13158.

The honest frame is not that Jiangmen invented a strategy. “13158” is an assigned rung in a province-designed division of labour — the electronics belt on the Pearl River’s east bank balanced by an advanced-equipment belt on the west bank, under the old provincial formula 有所为有所不为, “do what you are suited to and leave the rest”. The proof is a municipal record: the city’s industry and information-technology bureau, on 3 February 2026, wrote that it would raise the level of eight key industries and refine the mechanism for cultivating the fifteen chains — 推进八大重点产业能级提升，进一步优化15条产业链培育机制 — inside the provincial party committee’s “1310” deployment: an assignment logged by the receiving end. The one blue-book check runs the same way: the Greater Bay Area economic blue book devotes a single chapter to Jiangmen alone (B8; no page number).

Behind the label sit four campaign actions — upgrading traditional industries, expanding emerging ones, standardising parks, recruiting investment — and tools such as 揭榜挂帅 (jiēbǎng guàshuài, a competitive-tender route for research problems). One quarantine: district-level material says the city has nearly 100 robotics supply-chain firms (全市近百家机器人产业链企业), single-sourced from one district. The same material claims a large share of the global humanoid-robot supply chain; that figure is not credible as written and is not repeated.

“13158”, decoded

• 1 — 万亿工业强市: the overall goal; the draft industrialisation plan aims at ¥1trn of industrial gross output by 2030.
• 3 — 智能化、绿色化、融合化 (zhìnénghuà, lǜsèhuà, rónghéhuà): intelligent, green, integrated.
• 15 — the fifteen priority chains, named by the report: 硅能源, 造纸及纸制品, 新能源电池, 轨道交通, 新一代信息技术, 纺织服装, 石化新材料, 生物医药, 船舶与海工装备, 食品, 金属制品, 新能源汽车及零部件, 智能装备, 家电, 摩托车 — silicone energy, paper products, new-energy batteries, rail transit, next-generation information technology, textiles, petrochemical new materials, biomedicine, ships and marine engineering equipment, food, metal products, new-energy vehicles and parts, smart equipment, home appliances, motorcycles.
• 8 — the cluster structure: three clusters above ¥100bn already (agriculture and food, light industry and textiles, advanced materials); the “two new and one advanced” trio (两新一先, liǎngxīn yīxiān) of new energy, next-generation electronic information and advanced equipment manufacturing, pushed toward ¥100bn each; two future industries, artificial intelligence and robotics and the low-altitude economy (低空经济, dīkōng jīngjì).

§4 The Corridor the Plan Runs On — Preconditions, Not Achievements

The industrial numbers rest on infrastructure finished before the clock started. The crossings are told in their own right elsewhere; here they are preconditions. The Shenzhen–Zhongshan Link (深中通道, Shēnzhōng tōngdào) opened on 30 June 2024; the Huangmaohai Cross-Sea Corridor (黄茅海跨海通道, Huángmáohǎi kuàhǎi tōngdào) opened for trial operation on 11 December 2024, running about 31 km from Pingsha in Zhuhai to Doushan town in Taishan and cutting the Zhuhai–Jiangmen trip to roughly 30 minutes.

The plan commits the city to completing the Shenzhen–Jiangmen railway (深江铁路, Shēnjiāng tiělù) and the Zhuhai–Zhaoqing high-speed line (珠肇高铁, Zhūzhào gāotiě), and to seeking more originating services at Jiangmen Station (江门站, Jiāngménzhàn). Build schedules are targets: 2028 for the first, 2027 for the second; a Jiangmen–Zhuhai line is under study, not built.

One claim should travel with its owner: the Daguanghai belt is promoted as roughly one to one and a half hours from Hong Kong, Macao, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Dongguan — Taishan county government’s framing, not a measurement.

The corridor, in three lines

• Opened, dated: 深中通道 (30 June 2024), 黄茅海跨海通道 (11 December 2024, landing at Doushan, Taishan), 深圳机场江门航空港 (2024).
• Described as: 江门站 (Jiāngménzhàn), the province’s fourth-largest rail passenger hub in official material dated 2019–2020.
• Targeted: 深江铁路 (Shēnjiāng tiělù, 2028), 珠肇高铁 (Zhūzhào gāotiě, 2027); a Jiangmen–Zhuhai line under study.

The preconditions the 2030 industrial numbers rest on — some opened, some targeted, one still under study.

§5 The Science Bet: The Dual-Carbon Laboratory

If the plan has one credential that travels outside Guangdong, it is the Jiangmen Dual-Carbon Laboratory (江门双碳实验室, Jiāngmén shuāngtàn shíyànshì), founded in December 2021 by the municipal government with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) — the Hong Kong-university-plus-mainland-campus model that also produced CUHK-Shenzhen.

Its credential chain is datable: the Guangdong–Hong Kong Joint Laboratory for Carbon-Neutrality Science and Technology (粤港碳中和科学与技术联合实验室) was approved in 2023, the first joint Guangdong–Hong Kong laboratory in the dual-carbon field; a national postdoctoral research station followed in May 2024; the right to host National Natural Science Foundation projects in December 2024. By January 2025 the laboratory had been awarded 39 projects and incubated four companies.

Now the number that gets quoted, and the number underneath it. The “nearly 400 researchers” attached to the lab and the Qiaomengyuan park is a cumulative participation count — researchers who came to Jiangmen to exchange and work — not a standing headcount. The lab’s own full-time and jointly appointed staff numbered 83 in early 2024; one 2023 news report put it above 100. Both are true and they measure different things: a laboratory whose name travels has a small permanent core.

Its model is laboratory plus industrial park, with three named parks and a ¥1bn fund; in the 2023–24 cohort 12 to 15 institutions took space or unveiled plaques — two accounts, overlapping cohorts.

The structural warning is about where labs of its kind sit: national platforms such as Pengcheng Laboratory and Guangzhou Laboratory cluster in the bay area’s cores, leaving a second-tier city’s institution to contest spillover rather than set the agenda. The plan lists the dual-carbon lab beside the Kaiping neutrino laboratory (中微子实验室, zhōngwēizǐ shíyànshì); that project is its own story.

§6 The Gap the Plan Must Close

Jiangmen had about 1,890 high-tech enterprises at the end of 2025 — 1,893 on the statistical bulletin, 1,892 in the city’s five-year summary — plus 623 innovation platforms at provincial level or above. The 2,300 figure that has circulated traces to a 2021-era target of exceeding 2,300 by 2022, not to a count; a target presented as a result is the error this piece avoids.

Research spending is the second case. The city’s five-year summary gives R&D spending rising to ¥8.402bn. Against GDP of ¥429.391bn that is about 1.96 percent — under 2 percent — and it is this article’s arithmetic from two confirmed figures, not a published percentage. The 2.5 and 2.7 percent figures in city material are goals set in 2021 and 2022.

The specialised-SME ladder is tiered: 780 provincial 专精特新 (zhuānjīngtèxīn, “specialised, refined, distinctive and innovative”) enterprises in 2024, with a 2025 target of passing 850; above that tier the national “little giant” count runs in the low teens, and the national key “little giant” count reached eight by August 2026. Adding the tiers would produce a number no official source uses.

On the gap side, the blue book’s comparisons are the sharpest and the hardest to date: a low high-tech manufacturing share, a high-tech enterprise count below Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Dongguan, low R&D intensity against the bay area’s leading cities, and low industrial value-added rates and profit margins (B8; no page number) — assessments on a 2024 base, not web-verified current statistics. The one live, government-sourced movement is the mayor’s own: advanced-manufacturing and high-tech-manufacturing shares of above-scale industry up 3.5 and 1.8 points.

What the plan works on is largely stock, not greenfield: the traditional base — motorcycles and parts, metal products, paper, food, home appliances, textiles — sits inside that chain list.

The forward numbers are forecasts: the mayor projects 7.5 percent average annual growth in value-added across the fifteen chains, five chains above ¥60bn of output, and the motorcycle chain passing ¥50bn in 2026.

The gap, as the blue book states it

• Blue book (B8, 2024 base, no page number): low high-tech manufacturing share and R&D intensity against the bay area’s leading cities; a high-tech enterprise count below Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Dongguan; low value-added rates and profit margins.

§7 Where the Diaspora Is Invited

The invitation machinery is administrative, dated and continuous. Qiaomengyuan (侨梦苑, qiáoméngyuàn) opened on 22 December 2015, its core area in the Jiangmen National High-tech Zone, under a structure the city calls 一苑多园 (yī yuàn duō yuán, “one park, many sub-parks”), officially described as the sixth of sixteen nationwide and one of very few outside a provincial capital. Its 2024–2030 development plan sets out 19 measures, and a provincial scheme — the pilot on reforming overseas-Chinese investment facilitation — was issued by the provincial economic-system reform group.

Now the headline, exactly as the city reports it: as at the end of 2024 the prefecture had 4,232 overseas-Chinese-invested enterprises (侨资企业), 107 of them new that year, with about ¥3.75bn of new investment — a whole-prefecture stock plus one year’s flow, not the park’s industrial capital.

Two flows get blurred in that sentence, and separating them is the most useful arithmetic here. 侨资 (qiáozī) is returned investment capital; 侨汇 (qiáohuì) is family remittance money, and an aggregate investment total cannot stand in for industrial capital. The state’s own overseas-Chinese affairs research supplies the split: to 2021 the city had 3,979 overseas-Chinese-invested enterprises, of which 692 were above scale — 17.4 percent — carrying more than 30 percent of industrial output. Diaspora capital here is numerous and small: ten years of the park’s core produced 170-plus projects and over 1,300 jobs, and one year’s ¥3.75bn is roughly 2.7 percent of a single ¥100bn cluster.

Delivery runs on recognition more than markets: 92 events and about 5,200 visits home in 2024, 40-plus trade delegations and 12 projects signed. 侨商江门行, the “overseas merchants’ Jiangmen tour”, hires overseas businesspeople as investment partners, and the city has named honorary citizens (荣誉市民, róngyù shìmín) in five rounds since 1993. The plan-period instrument is 侨青侨企回归行动, an action to bring younger overseas Chinese and their firms back. The service layer is a separate article’s subject.

The invitation box

• 侨梦苑 — opened 22 December 2015; core in the Jiangmen National High-tech Zone; “one park, many sub-parks”.
• 大广海湾经济区 (Dàguǎnghǎiwān jīngjìqū) — about 3,240 km² across Xinhui, Taishan and Enping and 20 towns, on what official material calls the Pearl River Delta’s only large contiguous developable land; the one Jiangmen platform written into the national outline.
• 便利华侨华人投资制度专项改革试点 — the investment-facilitation pilot.
• 侨资 headline (end-2024, city-reported) — 4,232 firms city-wide, 107 added, about ¥3.75bn of new investment.
• The split: 侨资 is not 侨汇. Of 3,979 firms to 2021, 692 (17.4 percent) were above scale and carried over 30 percent of industrial output (State Council overseas-Chinese affairs research).

§8 The Greater Bay Area Frame

The plan puts its parent document first: in the city’s published interpretation, the fifteenth plan places “persevering with the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area” as the first of its priority tasks — a clause position, not rhetoric.

The stated line-up: major cooperation platforms as the handle — cooperation with Hong Kong and Macao in building the Daguanghai Bay economic zone, the Yinhuwan coastal new area, high-level planning of the Shenzhen–Jiangmen Economic Cooperation Zone (深江经济合作区), planned green-industry cooperation with Hong Kong; and the important platform for overseas-Chinese cultural exchange and cooperation.

How that line-up ranks is a judgement, and this reading is the article’s own: beside the bay area’s front-line platforms — Qianhai, Hengqin, Nansha, Hetao — Daguanghai Bay reads as second-tier. No official source ranks it that way; the plan lists its own platforms without a claim. The size is real; the position is derived, not stated.

What makes the frame live is the mechanisms attached to it: a Shenzhen-side park already open — the Shenzhen Nanshan–Jiangmen Jianghai cooperation industrial park, running on a “Shenzhen research, Jiangmen production” formula — provincial main-platform status for orderly industrial relocation, and an eight-town linkage (八镇联动, bā zhèn liándòng). In 2024 the main platform and the eight towns recorded project investment of ¥43.6bn and ¥34.5bn respectively, a single-page figure with no later update.

The plan’s own spatial formula should be quoted precisely, because a different phrase has been attached to it. The published interpretation uses 一中心三组团 (yī zhōngxīn sān zǔtuán, “one centre, three clusters”). A “one core, four sub-centres, multiple poles” formula was not located in the fifteenth-plan material and is not attributed to it here.

§9 What the Plan Is Betting Against

The trend line comes from the municipal gazetteer covering 1979 to 2000. In that record, overseas remittances peaked in the early 1980s — helped by the 1980 restoration of the remittance-goods supply and the remittance coupons (侨汇券, qiáohuì quàn) tied to it — then fell in relative weight through the 1990s, with receipts from foreign-invested ventures stalling after the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis. No source found extends that series past 2000.

The same archive shows what the money built. Overseas-Chinese donations (侨捐, qiáojuān) went into schools, hospitals and roads rather than factories, with Wuyi University’s founding in 1985 as the high-water case, and they fell as the qiaoxiang itself grew richer. The city’s own name for the correction it wants is a shift from 单向援助 to 双向奔赴 — from one-way aid to two-way convergence.

The asset is thinning. The city puts the diaspora at over 5.3 million Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and overseas compatriots — “two Jiangmens, at home and abroad”, a city-reported figure carrying the counting problem of a third- and fourth-generation population. The thinning evidence — fewer remittance letters, fewer visits home, weaker attachment — is gazetteer-sourced; no current volume or visits-home trend was found.

The talent programme reverses a habit the record documents: a “new 30 measures” policy since January 2024, recruitment under the provincial 百万英才汇南粤 programme, an industrial-engineer aggregation scheme — instruments answering a documented pattern of dependants’ children educated for emigration and talent flowing out. The comparison bar, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, is book-sourced.

Heritage is compliance and difference at once. Kaiping’s diaolou and villages (开平碉楼与村落, Kāipíng diāolóu yǔ cūnlùo) entered the World Heritage list in 2007, with 1,833 tower houses across 18 towns; the qiaopi archives (侨批档案, qiáopī dàng’àn) entered UNESCO’s Memory of the World register in 2013. Both are duties under the parent plan and assets Shenzhen or Dongguan cannot buy, which is why 45 towers are now in government custody. The returnee and restitution history belongs forward; the Haiyan farm resettlement is its own account; the coffee cluster is the taste-led exception; the coastal energy build-out is a different department.

One negative finding deserves stating flatly: no consistent 1979–2000 series of diaspora contribution to GDP exists in the record reviewed. Any claim assigning the diaspora a share of Jiangmen’s output is unbenchmarkable — probable at best, never confirmed.

§10 Close: The Plan and the Reader’s Stake

A five-year plan is a promise with a deadline. The deadline is 2035, the clock started in 2026, the growth target is 6 percent a year, and the corridor it runs on was built before the clock began — a mandate, a base and a corridor, more legible than a brochure.

The diaspora share of the plan is an invitation whose size is estimable rather than mysterious: about ¥3.75bn of one year’s new overseas-Chinese investment against clusters measured in the tens of billions; a laboratory with a Hong Kong university on the door and a standing staff of 83; a remittance flow that peaked before many readers were born.

What you can check yourself is short. The target: 6 percent a year, around 5 percent for 2026. The base: ¥429.39bn of GDP in 2025, seventh in the province, on a 4.7 percent five-year average that ranked fourth. The diaspora number: 4,232 overseas-Chinese-invested firms at the end of 2024. The laboratory’s credential: a joint Guangdong–Hong Kong laboratory approved in 2023, and the right to host national science-foundation projects granted in December 2024. And if this turns into a visit, the practical cluster starts here, with what it costs and how the paperwork works.

A region’s plan is written for people who are not in the room. The diaspora’s portion of this one is an invitation with a size you can now estimate — more useful than being flattered.

Continue Reading

• JUNO: The World’s Largest Neutrino Detector, 700 Metres Under Kaiping — the region’s other present-tense headline.
• The Dual Corridor Era: What Two Bridges Changed for Wuyi — the crossings the plan runs on.
• Jiangmen Overseas Chinese Platform, Updated: What the Greater Bay Area Offers Returning Families — the service layer behind the 侨资 invitation.
• Jiangmen City: The Gateway to the Wuyi Region — the five counties this plan serves.

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Sources

Source-vintage note: three vintages of evidence sit behind this piece kept apart in the text — the 2026 plan layer (government documents, official media interpretations, the 2025 statistical bulletin), the Greater Bay Area economic blue book’s comparisons (2024 base), and the municipal gazetteer, whose series closes at 2000. No source reviewed extends the remittance series past 2000, and no published 2025 R&D percentage was located: the ~1.96% figure is this article’s arithmetic from two confirmed numbers.

Plan and government documents
1. 《江门市国民经济和社会发展第十五个五年规划纲要》 (the 15th Five-Year Plan) — Jiangmen Municipal Government portal, 2026.
2. 2026年市政府工作报告 (the 2026 government work report), delivered 5 February 2026 by Mayor 吴晓晖 — “13158” explained, Southern Daily, 2026-02-05.
3. 《江门市推动新型工业化”十五五”规划（征求意见稿）》 — draft industrialisation plan, Jiangmen Municipal Government portal.
4. 2026年全市工业和信息化工作会议 — Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology, dated 3 February 2026.

Statistics and records
5. 《2025年江门市国民经济和社会发展统计公报》 — Jiangmen Municipal Statistics Bureau and the National Bureau of Statistics Jiangmen survey team.
6. Jiangmen’s 十四五 economic summary — Jiangmen Municipal Government.
7. 《江门市志（1979—2000）》 — the municipal gazetteer (print; series closes at 2000).
8. 《粤港澳大湾区经济发展报告（2025）》 — the GBA economic blue book, Jiangmen chapter (B8; no page number).

Reporting
9. 南方+ — “十四五”顺利收官，江门GDP总量全省排名上升1位 (2026-02-05).
10. 中国新闻网·广东 — 江门：今年GDP预期目标增长5%左右 (2026-02-06).
11. 国务院侨办《侨务工作研究》— 全国各地”侨梦苑”建设风采（二）.

External Resources:
– Jiangmen’s Qiaomengyuan core park — provincial platform listing
– 江门”侨梦苑”又升级了 — The Paper, 2025-09-03
– Jiangmen’s 2021 innovation-city plan — a high-tech target, not a count
– 开平碉楼与村落 — Guangdong’s first World Heritage site
– The Dual-Carbon Laboratory’s right to host national science-funding projects, 2024
– Huangmaohai Cross-Sea Corridor opens for trial operation — China News, 2024
– Jiangmen’s talent “new 30 measures” — State Council overseas-Chinese affairs office
– 深圳机场江门航空港启用 — Shenzhen municipal government

Image credits: hero and body photographs from Wikimedia Commons — luchangjiang~鲁昌江 (CC BY-SA 3.0), 江门市人民政府 (public domain, plan cover), Glabb (CC BY-SA 3.0), and Kerorofire, 中少, Tim Wu, Lhzss8, Yumeto, DragonSamYU (CC BY-SA 4.0). Where a sourced photograph substitutes for the planned subject, the caption names what it actually shows.