Aerial photo taken on June 23, 2020 shows a view of the Humen Bridge, which links Guangzhou City and Dongguan City, in south China's Guangdong Province. With the building of traffic arteries, the connectivity in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has been continuously improved. The convenient transport network has also enhanced the logistics efficiency within the area and injected new vitality into local development of business.(Photo: Xinhua)

The GDP of Dongguan, a manufacturing and export powerhouse in South China's Guangdong Province, is expected to hit 1.1 trillion yuan ($157.77 billion) this year, media reported on Wednesday, citing official an estimate.

The city's expansion, albeit at a slower pace, maintained its position in the country's 1-trillion-yuan GDP club. Dongguan's resilience, along with that of Changsha, capital of Central China's Hunan Province - another member of the club - shows the effectiveness of wide-ranging moves at the central and local government levels to shore up growth in the face of varied headwinds, including the epidemic.

Throughout the year, the city of Dongguan has stabilized its economic fundamentals, with GDP estimated to exceed 1.1 trillion yuan, according to the China News Service, citing statistics from the fifth plenum of the 15th Congress of the Communist Party of China Dongguan Committee on Wednesday. 

Dongguan has rolled out measures to help businesses explore markets, grab orders and foster production in the face of the grim epidemic situation. The city and the towns and villages under its jurisdiction have accordingly moved to offer tax and fee rebates, cuts and exemptions and financial aid, and enable smoother logistics, thereby helping many companies survive and recover, the report said.

As pivotal engines of the economy, these super-sized cities in GDP terms weathered the epidemic, allowing for overall economic stabilization to pay off, Cao Heping, an economist at Peking University, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Large coastal cities in Southeast China with mobile populations seem to have taken a heavier hit from the viral fallout, Cao said. 

In 2021, Dongguan's GDP hit 1.09 trillion yuan, growing at an annualized 8.2 percent, according to official numbers. The city became an economic giant in 2021 with GDP upwards of 1 trillion yuan and a local population of more than 10 million. 

China's GDP at current prices hit 114.92 trillion yuan in 2021, according to final numbers released Tuesday by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), an upward revision of 556.7 billion yuan from the preliminary estimate.

The GDP growth rate was revised up to 8.4 percent last year, better than the preliminary estimate of 8.1 percent, per NBS data.

To help the nation's economy emerge from the prolonged pandemic, escalating geopolitical tensions and other issues this year, the central government has unveiled pro-growth measures and mobilized economic powerhouses to revive the overall economy.

Changsha is estimated to have logged an annual growth rate of 4.8 percent in GDP, among the best performers of cities with economies of at least 1 trillion yuan, according to the local government work report delivered Wednesday by Zheng Jianxin, mayor of Changsha.

The city's market entities totaled 1.56 million in 2022 and the addition of major industrial firms reached more than 300, according to its government work report, which attributed the gains into local efforts to firmly stabilize the economy. A targeted approach to viral containment without resorting to any "citywide lockdowns" was considered to have propped up the economy.

Last year, Changsha's GDP grew by 7.5 percent year-on-year to 1.33 trillion yuan, official data showed. The city was the second city in Central China to have seen GDP top 1 trillion yuan, following Wuhan in Central China's Hubei Province. 

The stellar numbers Changsha posted were emblematic of a brighter picture of GDP growth in the case of economic powerhouses in Central China, Cao remarked. 

Compared with metropolises such as Beijing and Shanghai and export hubs such as Dongguan, it's likely that Changsha and other trillion-yuan club members including Guizhou, Wuhan, Zhengzhou and Nanjing record better-than-expected growth numbers for this year, he said.

Looking ahead, the aforementioned powerhouses might continue to blaze the trail of growth next year, the economist continued, citing an estimated robust rebound in cultural, tourism sectors in these cities with a rich collection of scenic attractions.

The local commitments to healthcare, big data and a push for digital infrastructure across these localities tend to rev up the economic revival also, he reckoned.

Changsha apparently set its sights on a brisker economy next year, as it unveiled a slew of growth targets in its government work report. 

The city set GDP growth target at around 7 percent for 2023 when the added value of local major industrial firms would rise by more than 8 percent, local social retail sales would see an increase of 7 percent, fixed-asset investment would grow a minimum 7 percent and imports and exports would be up at least 12 percent. 

Nationwide, along with a return to normalcy in consumption and production activity in the wake of fundamental optimization of viral prevention and control, the Chinese economy is expected to see an uptrend throughout the four quarters of next year, said Yang Delong, chief economist at Shenzhen-based First Seafront Fund Management Co, putting the full-year GDP growth at more than 5 percent.