According to the recent government work report released by Xinfeng, a county in Jiangxi province, east China, its three pillar industries — electronic information, high-end equipment manufacturing and new energy — achieved synergistic growth in 2025. Their year-on-year revenue increased 23.6 percent, 37.3 percent and 36.3 percent respectively.

Since the Xinfeng High-tech Zone was listed as a provincial-level industrial cluster and a pilot zone for the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the digital transformation of manufacturing industries has advanced.

Once a traditional agricultural county and a former revolutionary base area, Xinfeng is now listed among the first batch of economically strong counties in Jiangxi and approved as a national innovative county. It has evolved into a nationally renowned printed circuit board (PCB) industry cluster.

Building an industry from scratch

As early as 2002, the first batch of Xinfeng entrepreneurs doing business in south China's Guangdong province brought the spark of the electronic information industry back home. However, due to Xinfeng's landlocked location, the development of its electronic information industry was long constrained by weak industrial foundation.

Then Xinfeng leveraged its geographical proximity to the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. It seized the strategic opportunities of the Ganzhou-Shenzhen pairing assistance, an initiative in which technologically and economically advanced Shenzhen assists Jiangxi's Ganzhou in its development, and the joint development partnership with Shenzhen's Bao'an district, to connect with leading enterprises in the electronic information industry chain.

In 2022, Shenzhen Hans CNC Technology, a leading enterprise in PCB manufacturing, chose to settle in Xinfeng. Today, driven by anchor enterprises such as Hans CNC and Shenzhen Kinwong Electronic, Xinfeng has built an electronic information industry chain centered on green PCB.

In 2025, the county's electronic information industry generated an output value of 28.34 billion RMB, accounting for three-quarters of the total output value of industrial enterprises, official data shows.

Upgrading enterprises from survival to excellence

From tech-oriented SMEs to high-tech enterprises and then to high-growth companies, the Science and Technology Bureau of Xinfeng provides personalized technological service guidance tailored to enterprises at different development stages, ensuring they benefit from policy incentives and subsidies, according to Lan Yu, director of the bureau.

Lan said to address financing difficulties, three types of financial products such as the "Ke Dai Tong" (Tech Loan) issued a total of 1.2 billion RMB in loans in 2025, ranking first in Ganzhou.

Currently, the proportion of R&D investment in the regional GDP has reached 2.11 percent, higher than the provincial and municipal averages. With 109 high-tech enterprises, sci-tech achievements continue to emerge.

Furthermore, Xinfeng has built bridges for industry-university-research cooperation. In 2025, it deepened cooperation with Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, founding an electronic intelligent manufacturing research institute and enabling on-site industrialization of university research achievements in factory workshops.