A research cohort led by Professor Zhang Weiguo, Dean of the College of Management, Shenzhen University, has finalized the interim research report commissioned under Guangdong Federation of Social Sciences’ flagship provincial project “Academic Investigation of Southern Guangdong’s Local Development”. Designed to pool elite social science talent across the province, the initiative deploys university scholars to conduct field-based developmental studies covering 57 counties, county-level cities and districts throughout Guangdong. Tasked with research in Taishan City, a coastal southwest Guangdong hub famed for marine resources and overseas Chinese communities, the interdisciplinary team brings together academics from the College of Management and the School of Financial Technology to anchor the city’s bespoke developmental research.
Guided by the core philosophy of field-driven research targeted at practical socioeconomic challenges, the research group adopted an all-round immersive investigation framework. Spanning 28 days from April 14 to May 12, team members completed more than 200 in-person consultations with local administrative bureaus, 29 market entities and 11 industrial parks across Taishan, accumulating raw research materials close to 300,000 Chinese characters. Drawing on the school’s solid multidisciplinary disciplinary edges, researchers blended quantitative modelling and grounded theoretical analysis to unpack five pivotal sectors: municipal governance, territorial spatial layout, market expansion, public service provision and local consumption. Core research priorities centered on Taishan’s prominent bottlenecks including industrial restructuring, marine economy iteration and the integrated development of agriculture, cultural tourism and related industries, turning scholarly theories into operable local developmental roadmaps.
One standout deliverable of the fieldwork is Taishan’s maiden citywide Industrial Development Atlas, which systematically maps industrial logics, spatial distribution and major project arrangements. Containing 686 indexing entries and zoning divisions across 52 functional areas, the atlas pinpoints systemic shortcomings and developmental gaps within Taishan’s key industrial chains ranging from mariculture and port logistics to food manufacturing. Building upon mapped data, the research team put forward five customized developmental pathways: port-industry synergization, coordinated land-and-marine growth, deep-sea resource exploitation plus brand cultivation, diversified energy matching, and agri-culture-tourism conglomeration. These data-backed proposals furnish solid scientific references for Taishan’s policymaking, investment promotion and sustained high-quality economic expansion, consolidating the school’s positioning as a trusted university think tank for regional socioeconomic progress.
Aside from tangible local economic dividends, the collaborative field research substantially boosts the school’s applied social science disciplinary development. The project facilitates cross-disciplinary integration among management, finance and regional economics disciplines and cultivates faculty and students with hands-on field research competency. It also pioneers a sustainable university-local government cooperation paradigm that accelerates the transformation of academic research into real-world socioeconomic gains. Moving forward, the research team will further polish research findings covering carbon sink asset appraisal, inclusive finance construction and industrial upgrading schemes, continuing to leverage the school’s academic strengths to power county-level economic revitalization across Guangdong and advance China’s broader rural revitalization agenda.
