China’s high-tech rise is leaving much of the country behind That could make a** starkly unequal** country even more so Jun 2nd 2026|TIANSHUI|6 min read Listen to this story LIKE MANY cities in China’s hinterland, Tianshui, in the western province of Gansu, is full of dusty and disused factories. But over the past decade it has also become an unlikely high-tech hub. New industrial parks have sprouted, offering companies cheap energy, financing and land deals. The city has already built an exhibition hall to display the zippy products it hopes to make in the future, called “Tianshui Industry 2050”. All this will please officials in far-off Beijing. They want China’s rust belt to reinvent itself with technology. Just recently they released yet another plan for urban renewal, calling for the transformation of stagnant cities into “innovative” places that can offer their inhabitants a “high-quality life”. Yet for all the fanfare, the people of Tianshui are not much better off. The new factories have failed to offset a broader slowdown in the city’s economy: ten years ago Tianshui’s GDP per person was 16% of Beijing’s; now it is 14%. In 2025 the city’s economy grew at a rate two percentage points slower than the national average. Nor, say locals, have the highly automated facilities created many jobs for them. Throngs of young people are leaving in search of better opportunities. Over the past decade, its population has shrunk by nearly half a million to 2.9m. At this rate, by 2050 there will be few workers left. The tale of Tianshui shows the limits of China’s big bet on advanced manufacturing. The Communist Party has decided the country’s economic future lies in making world-beating technology. So hundreds of cities across the country are, like Tianshui, trying hard to do so. But while the high-tech drive has helped some brainy, connected and wealthy cities become even richer, most of those in the hinterland lack the supply chains or talent to take advantage of it. After all, some 60% of China’s workforce—about 500m people—do not even have a high-school education. Many of them live in smaller and poorer cities. For centuries Tianshui was more a cultural than an economic hub. Legend has it that China’s first emperor, a serpent-bodied demi-god, was born there; Buddhist grottoes have been cut out of the cliffs nearby. But in the 1960s Tianshui industrialised. It became an important cog in the state-planned economy; its factories made tractors, ball bearings and matches. A tale of two cities Dormitories, schools and hospitals were built to cater to the swelling labour force. One of the workers was Ms Dong, now in her 80s, who enjoyed an ultra-stable “iron rice bowl” job at a printing press. She retired in her 40s with a good pension and a guarantee that her son could inherit her job. But most local factories were not competitive enough to survive China’s bumpy transition to a more market-driven economy in the 1980s and 1990s. In the past ten years a new generation of high-tech factories, making gizmos such as sensors and machine tools, has sprung up. But they have not brought many jobs with them. An exhibit at Tianshui’s museum displays snapshots of the city’s factory floors over the decades. Each shows fewer workers and more robots. Most of the factory positions that are available pay around 3,000 yuan ($440) a month, according to locals, half what they could get in a big city like Shanghai. “I’d like to stay here to settle down, but there’s just no good jobs for young people,” says Wen Jin, a 27-year-old Tianshui native who has moved to Jiangsu province, a wealthy eastern region. The city’s best days are firmly in the past, reckons Ma Xin, another local in his 20s who is hoping to get out. High-tech industries do create well-paid jobs as well, in research and development, for instance. But these positions are mainly clustered in big cities near China’s coast, like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, which boast the best universities, brightest graduates and access to the densest supply chains. Tech-sector salaries in such places have shot up in recent years, some topping 1m yuan a year. But few parts of inland China have a chance of attracting such stellar jobs, explains Dan Wang of Eurasia Group, a consultancy. “The vast majority of Chinese cities are stuck with what they have.” Even as Tianshui is unable to gain from China’s new economic model, it struggles with the problems of the old one. China’s growth has slowed in recent years thanks, in large part, to a lingering property crisis that is gripping the country. House prices have fallen fastest in smaller cities like Tianshui. Unfinished concrete flats litter the city’s outskirts; investment in property there fell by over 40% last year. This in turn has been a drag on consumption because people feel poorer. Total retail sales in Tianshui slipped by a little over 5% in 2025. Gloomy walks through its malls reveal shuttered shops and empty restaurants. There is a risk that these trends, multiplied across China’s smaller cities, will cause the gaps between the country’s haves and have-nots to widen further. The economic slowdown seems to have hit the poor hardest, according to data compiled by Li Shi, a professor at Zhejiang University in the eastern city of Hangzhou. In a paper published in April he cited surveys showing that China’s bottom tenth of workers by income saw their wages rise by only 2% per year from 2018 to 2023, compared with an average annual growth rate of around 5%. China’s government knows that high-tech factories are not an economic panacea. Investment in machinery and other physical assets “has fuelled China’s economic boom, but its returns have gradually declined”, noted Xinhua, the official state news agency, earlier this year. China’s latest five-year plan, which was released in March and covers the period to 2030, called for “investing in people” as well as factories, to make the economy more equal. In practice, that would mean much more government spending on education, particularly for children from poor families, giving them the skills and knowledge to get better-paid jobs. But as the people of Tianshui would attest, that is easier said than done. The city’s budget is far smaller than those of wealthy places—it spends less than one-third of the amount per pupil in school that Beijing does, for example. And the economic downturn threatens to turn this into a cycle of decline; the city’s fiscal revenues fell by nearly a tenth last year. Few of Tianshui’s students ever make it to the country’s best universities. “It’s too difficult for children to compete here,” says Shi Tingting, the mother of a 12-year-old girl. “They end up trapped.” ■ 中國的高科技崛起正將這個國家的很大一部分留在後面 那可能使一個明顯不平等的國家變得更加如此 2026年6月2日 | 天水 | 6分鐘閱讀時間 像許多在中國腹地的城市一樣，天水，在西部省份甘肅，充滿了落滿灰塵的和廢棄的工廠。 但在過去十年間它也已經成為一個出乎意料的高科技樞紐。 新工業園區已經湧現，提供公司廉價的能源、融資和土地交易。 這座城市已經建造了一個展覽廳來展示它希望在未來製造的敏捷的產品，叫做「天水工業2050」。 這一切將會取悅在遙遠北京的官員們。 他們想要中國的鐵鏽地帶用技術來重塑自身。 就在最近他們發布了又一個關於城市更新的計劃，呼籲將停滯的城市轉型為能夠為他們的居民提供「高質量生活」的「創新的」地方。 然而儘管有所有的宣傳，天水的人民並沒有好過多少。 新的工廠已經未能抵消在這座城市經濟中一個更廣泛的放緩：十年前天水的人均GDP是北京的16%；現在它是14%。 在2025年這座城市的經濟以一個比全國平均慢兩個百分點的速度增長。 當地人說，高度自動化的設施也沒有為他們創造許多工作。 成群的年輕人正為了尋找更好的機會而離開。 在過去十年間，它的人口已經萎縮了接近五十萬到290萬。 照這個速度，到2050年將會幾乎沒有工人留下。 天水的故事顯示了中國在先進製造業上的大賭注的局限。 共產黨已經決定這個國家的經濟未來在於製造舉世無雙的技術。 所以全國各地數以百計的城市正像天水一樣，努力嘗試這樣做。 但是雖然高科技驅動已經幫助了一些聰明的、有脈絡的且富裕的城市變得更加富有，大多數在腹地的那此城市缺乏供應鏈或人才來利用它。 畢竟，大約60%的中國勞動力——大約5億人——甚至沒有一個高中教育。 他們中的許多人居住在較小的和較窮的城市。 幾個世紀以來天水更多是一個文化的而非經濟的樞紐。 傳說它說中國的第一位皇帝，一個蛇身的半神，出生在那裡；佛教石窟已經從附近的峭壁上被開鑿出來。 但在1960年代天水工業化了。 它成為了國家計劃經濟中一個重要的齒輪；它的工廠製造拖拉機、滾珠軸承和火柴。 雙城記 宿舍、學校和醫院被建造來迎合膨脹的勞動力。 工人中的一個是董女士，現在在她80多歲，其在一家印刷廠享受了一個超穩定的「鐵飯碗」工作。 她在她40多歲時退休，帶著一份好的退休金和一個她的兒子能夠繼承她的工作的保證。 但大多數本地的工廠不夠有競爭力到足以在1980年代和1990年代中國向一個更加市場驅動的經濟的顛簸轉型中倖存。 在過去十年中新一代的高科技工廠，製造諸如傳感器和機床之類的小玩意，已經湧現。 但是它們沒有隨之帶來許多
