South China's Hainan Province has seen rapid growth in foreign trade in the past four years, with an expansion of nearly 75 percent.

Hainan Island was designed to become a pilot free trade zone (FTZ), while simultaneously exploring and steadily pushing forward the building of a free trade port (FTP) with Chinese characteristics. Wednesday marks the fourth anniversary of the construction of the Hainan FTZ and FTP.

As a result of the construction of the FTP, Haikou, capital of Hainan, inked 36 projects with a total planned investment of over 13 billion yuan ($2 billion) on Monday, the first batch of large-scale projects for 2022.

Hainan also signed 21 medical projects including in the biomedicine secctor, with a total planned investment of 6.6 billion yuan ($1 billion) as the Hainan FTP focuses on cultivating and developing this high-tech industry.

The island has seen rapid growth in foreign trade and duty-free shopping.

In 2021, the total value of Hainan's imports and exports was 147.7 billion yuan ($23.2 billion), up 57.7 percent year-on-year, and 36.3 percentage points faster than the national growth of foreign trade, according to the customs of Hainan.

In 2018, Hainan's foreign trade stood at 84.9 billion yuan ($13.3 billion), which shows an increase in trade of 73.9 percent in the past four years.

In Q1 of 2022, Hainan customs supervised 14.7 billion yuan ($2.3 billion) of duty-free sales on the island, up 8.4 percent year-on-year. According to statistics from the local customs released on Monday, the island saw 20.27 million duty-free sales transactions in the first quarter, up 14.2 percent.

The average purchase amount was 8,372 yuan ($1,314), up 10.2 percent. The sales of cosmetics, jewelry and watches ranked at the top three.

The Overall Plan for the Construction of the Hainan FTP was released in June 2020. According to the project, Hainan will be transformed into an FTP in three stages in 2025, 2035 and 2050, which will play an important role in China's continued opening-up and expansion of foreign trade.

In addition, the Hainan FTP was also included in a roadmap for the development of the Beibu Gulf urban cluster, China's top economic planner announced on Thursday.

A dedicated international Internet data channel will be built in Hainan by 2025. The container output of the international container hub port in Hainans Yangpu region will reach 5 million TEUs by 2025, according to the roadmap for the 14th Five Year Plan (2021-25).

The plan also included the construction of a regional hub oriented to the Pacific and Indian Oceans at Haikou Meilan International Airport.