he Yangtze River Economic Belt has made great strides in green development and ecological protection, according to senior officials at a press conference on January 5.
China’s State Council told media that in the past decade, the proportion of sections with good water quality in the Yangtze River Economic Belt has increased sharply from 67 percent to 96.5 percent, with regional GDP doubling, accounting for 47.3 percent of the country’s total, a 5 percent growth from 10 years ago.
On January 5, 2016, Chinese President Xi Jinping presided over a symposium on the development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, an initiative launched in early 2016 spanning 11 provinces and municipalities, including Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou provinces as well as Chongqing and Shanghai municipalities. Xi stressed the importance of ecological protection in the basin while cutting back on excessive exploitation.
In March that year, the government released a national development program on the Yangtze River Economic Belt, defining a new pattern of development and clarifying that the general objective was prioritizing ecological protection and restoration and promoting green development to reconcile growth with long-term environmental resilience.
To achieve the objective, China has concentrated on dealing with industrial and water pollution, shutting and moving nearly 10,000 chemical enterprises and dismantling 1,361 illegal docks, according to deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission Wang Changlin. These efforts have raised the water quality of the Yangtze River’s main streams to Class II, meaning they are suitable as a source of drinking water, habitats for rare aquatic animals and the reproduction of fish.
To restore the ecology, authorities also implemented a 10-year fishing ban in the Yangtze River on January 1, 2021. According to the mid-term appraisal conducted by several professional organizations including the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Fudan University in Shanghai, biodiversity in the Yangtze River has improved, with the number of fish species increasing by 43 to 351 between 2021 and 2025, and the number of Yangtze finless porpoises, the only cetaceans in the Yangtze River, increasing to 1,426 in 2025, 177 more than in 2022. A program to breed and conserve Chinese sturgeon, dubbed “the giant panda of the waters,” has seen some success. In 2025, the authorities have released 1.05 million young Chinese sturgeon into the river, with monitoring showing that 12.2 percent of the released young Chinese sturgeon entered the sea through the Yangtze River, with their length and weight both showing growth.
To ensure the livelihoods of some 231,000 fishers, authorities rolled out measures such as supporting local specialty industries, granting assistance to employers and startups, and increasing charitable posts. The mid-term appraisal showed that all registered fishers have benefited from government assistance or preferential policies.
Officials believe the Yangtze River Economic Belt is demonstrating technological innovations and green development. High-tech enterprises have been established in the zone, including AI startup DeepSeek and robot maker Unitree, as well as several industrial clusters in sectors like vehicles, automobile manufacturing and electronic information. The Economic Belt also has 24 national carbon peak pilot cities and zones and 14 zero-carbon industrial zones.
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