China's Shandong sees marked economic growth in past decade

JINAN, Aug. 21 (Xinhua) -- East China's Shandong Province has seen marked economic growth, improvement of people's livelihood and progress in environmental protection in the past decade, provincial officials said at a press briefing Saturday.

The province's gross domestic product amounted to 8.3 trillion yuan (about 1.2 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2021, up 66 percent compared to that in 2012.

Shandong insists on urban-rural integrated development and promotes coordinated regional development, said Li Ganjie, secretary of the Shandong Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China.

In the past ten years, the province's urbanization rate of permanent residents increased by 12 percentage points, and the per capita disposable income rose about 8.5 percent annually on average. Some 2.52 million people had been lifted out of poverty, Li said.

Shandong's energy consumption per unit GDP decreased by 4.2 percent on average each year in the past decade, and the proportion of coal in energy consumption declined by 13.8 percentage points. In the last two years, the average concentration of hazardous airborne particles PM 2.5 dropped by 11.5 percent and 15.2 percent, respectively.

According to Shandong Governor Zhou Naixiang, the province's foreign trade volume increased from 1.5 trillion yuan to 2.9 trillion yuan from 2012 to 2021, and the proportion of its actual use of foreign capital to the national total grew from 4.8 percent to 12.4 percent in the same period.