Recently, a piece of news made many Hunanese feel a jolt in their hearts.
The first-half GDP data was released, and Hunan was overtaken by Anhui by a slim margin of 30 billion yuan.
30 billion yuan, set against the economic scale of two provinces, is almost negligible. But what truly stings is the trend. Five years ago, Hunan still led Anhui by more than 250 billion yuan. In just a few years, Anhui has risen rapidly on the back of new energy vehicles, new displays, and integrated circuits — its “core, screen, auto, and chip” cluster has become a nationally renowned industrial calling card. On Hunan’s side, construction machinery and rail transit remain competitive, but its presence in the new tracks has indeed become somewhat dimmer.
After the news came out, the reaction among Hunanese was quite complicated. Some were anxious, some unconvinced, and some began to seriously dissect the problems.
To be honest, this widely discussed anxiety is itself a good thing.
I am a Hunanese working in Foshan, Guangdong. This year, Foshan’s GDP was overtaken by Dongguan within the province, but honestly, this topic has barely generated any buzz. The limited discussions mostly try to make excuses for Foshan, emphasizing that its economy is tied to real estate and that the broader environment is to blame. Compared with Foshan’s somewhat “resigned” state, at least Hunanese are still worried, still looking for solutions, and still refusing to give in.
But after reading many articles that prescribe remedies for Hunan, I have increasingly leaned toward one judgment.
The ailment of Hunan’s economy is not that no one has written a prescription. On the contrary, the prescription has long been written, and written very accurately. The real problem is that the medicine hasn’t been taken.
It is like a chronic patient: the treatment plan is already there, the doctor has repeated the instructions countless times, but the patient just cannot stick to the medication over the long term. Missing a dose today, forgetting one tomorrow, and slipping back into old habits as soon as there is a slight improvement — over time, even the best prescription becomes useless.
Hunan’s current predicament is not about how to draw the next “development blueprint,” but how to move that blueprint from paper to the ground.
The “prescription” was actually written very early, even earlier than the rest of the country
If we look back over Hunan’s journey in the past two decades or so, we find a surprising fact: Hunan has actually been farsighted in many matters, and its actions even preceded those of the rest of the country.
Let’s start with transportation.
Many people do not know that Hunan was once a pacesetter in national expressway construction. In the years after 2005, Hunan launched a massive transportation construction campaign, ranking among the top in the country for new expressway mileage for several consecutive years, fundamentally transforming Hunan’s old transportation pattern of “south by boat, north by horse.” This included the later-opened Wuhan–Guangzhou high-speed railway, the country’s first high-speed rail line, half of which runs through Hunan. By the end of 2025, Hunan’s expressway mileage had exceeded 8,000 kilometers — a foundation that is by no means thin by national standards.
The roads were built well, but the reputation gradually began to falter.
In recent years, a rather painful saying has circulated online: “go around Hunan.” Some long-haul drivers complain about sudden speed-limit changes on certain Hunan expressways, dense electronic surveillance, and poor truck-driving experiences. You could certainly say this is an amplification of online sentiment and not to be taken too seriously. But when “detour if you can” becomes a recurring collective experience, it indicates that something has indeed gone wrong in some places.
No matter how well the roads are built, if those traveling on them feel uneasy and face higher costs, the value of those roads is diminished. The essence of a transportation hub is service capability; hardware is just the skeleton, while the soft environment is the flesh and blood. “Going around Hunan” precisely exposes a deeper problem: we are good at building “visible” things, but not so good at maintaining “invisible” ones.
The same applies to roads as to institutions.
In 2011, Hunan proposed building a “Rule-of-Law Hunan” and issued the “Hunan Provincial Administrative Procedure Regulations.” How forward-looking was this move? At that time, the concept of “Rule-of-Law China” had not even been formally proposed. Hunan had already identified the crux of the matter: whether a place can truly attract businesses and retain capital ultimately depends on the stability of its rules and the standardization of government behavior, not on how much land subsidies it offers.
This “prescription” could hardly be more precise. At that time, Hunan already realized that future economic competition is essentially a competition of governance capacity.
But what happened afterward? The idea of “Rule-of-Law Hunan” did not disappear, yet reality kept slapping it in the face, at one point ranking Hunan near the bottom in judicial civilization appraisals. Many real-world operations have shown a widening gap with this ideal. Examples like the chaotic investment promotion at the children’s bike industrial park in Leiyang, Hengyang, exposed by CCTV’s “Focus Report”; the repeatedly criticized “entrap-and-exploit” style of investment promotion; and the inertia in some places of “first attract investment, and deal with the rest later” — these incidents repeatedly remind us that the rules written in documents and the rules operating in reality are two different things.
The prescription was well written, but the efficacy has been continuously diluted through layers of transmission.
The lesion is not in the mind, but in the habits
Why is the medicine always not taken properly? Because for a place, the hardest thing to change is not strategy, or even institutions, but habits.
Bureaucracy and the “official-standard” mindset are exactly the most stubborn habits on Hunan’s body. They are not some great evil, but an inertia that permeates daily operations.
Some time ago, a video surfaced online of a state-owned enterprise chairman in Changde accepting gifts in his office. In the footage, he had a “Heshitain” cigarette dangling from his mouth, red banknotes on the table, and what gave people the biggest jolt was the statuette of Chairman Mao sitting upright on the desk.
Every element was so real, yet so absurd.
Especially that cigarette. To be honest, those of us working outside the province rarely see such a deep obsession with a particular cigarette brand elsewhere. But in certain circles in Hunan, if the cigarette you hand out is not that brand, you lose face. This is no longer about the cigarette itself; it is an expression of identity, an invisible business card for entry into a certain circle. And many people simply cannot afford this level of consumption on their salaries.
When a business card matters more than a written rule, the underlying logic of economic operation changes. What entrepreneurs fear most is not high costs, but uncertainty. They do not know whether to follow the document or the “business card” today.
Another more painful example is the “township civil servant” fishing drowning incident that occurred in Yongzhou earlier this year. The loss of a young life tore open a gray corner of that township’s daily operations. At the time, the media conducted in-depth reports on the incident, and the local unspoken rules and grassroots operational logic behind it were shocking.
What does all this have to do with the economic deceleration we are talking about? A great deal.
Behind those broken promises in investment promotion, those hidden costs that make businesses suffer in silence, and those daily encounters that ultimately push young talents to buy a southbound high-speed rail ticket — all of these are underpinned by this inertia. An administrative system that is accustomed to treating businesses as objects of management, to subordinating rules to personal connections, and to coping with top-level design through formalism cannot possibly support a grand strategy like the “Three Highlands and Four New Missions.”
Fiscal pressure further exacerbates this inertial distortion. When revenues decline and debt mounts, some grassroots behaviors go awry — excessive enforcement, frequent inspections, delayed payments to businesses, and difficulties in fulfilling promises. These short-term actions are cashing out a locality’s most precious long-term asset: confidence.
Changsha’s “bureau-level” conundrum and the “two skins” of Chang-Zhu-Tan
Bureaucracy is not only reflected in work styles; sometimes it also appears in the awkwardness of institutional design.
Take the merger of Xiangjiang New Area and Yuelu District. Originally, Xiangjiang New Area was a functional zone carrying major strategies, covering parts of Yuelu District, Wangcheng, and Ningxiang — it should have been a broad chessboard breaking through administrative boundaries. But in the end, it became a “district-government integration” with Yuelu District, taking the shell of a county-level administrative district and fitting it with a main-department-level (zhengtin‑ji) structure.
Changsha itself is only a main-department-level city, and now one of its districts has become a department-level unit. As a result, Changsha has become one of the rare prefecture-level cities in the country where all internal organs of government departments are called “divisions” (chu), with directors and deputy directors everywhere. And the bureaus under Yuelu District are now also full of directors and deputy directors. This inflation of titles may seem trivial, but it actually pushes vertical administrative coordination costs to an abnormally high level. This is itself a path dependency that substitutes formal “upgrading” for substantive reform.
In fact, when the issue of a female cadre from the Changsha Sports Bureau occupying a parking space came up some time ago, many netizens were immediately drawn to the word “director” (chuzhang). Had she been honestly called a “deputy section chief,” it might not have sparked such a public outcry.
Another perennial topic is the integration of Changsha, Zhuzhou, and Xiangtan (Chang-Zhu-Tan).
This concept was proposed earlier than most metropolitan circles in the country. The geographical distance among the three cities — Changsha, Zhuzhou, and Xiangtan — is even closer than many already integrated metropolitan areas. But after so many years of advocacy, the local gripe is: it feels more like Xiangtan is the only one eager, while Changsha’s development direction has shifted now westward, now northward, now eastward — the force truly oriented southward has never fully demonstrated the full capability that a provincial capital should have.
The result is that Changsha grows stronger, but its strength resembles a giant pump, continuously absorbing talent and resources from its surroundings. Yet the actions of industrial spillover, functional dispersion, and truly turning Zhuzhou and Xiangtan into its industrial cooperation zones have been far too slow. If a province has only one super engine while the other wheels do not turn, the vehicle cannot run fast.
“Emancipating the mind” — the hardest to emancipate is oneself
Intriguingly, at the start of spring in 2024, the first major thing Hunan did was to deploy a province-wide “emancipate the mind” discussion.
This precisely shows that the administrators already know where the root cause lies.
For a place to talk about “emancipating the mind” at such a high profile at the beginning of the year is in itself a highly symbolic self-diagnosis. It is equivalent to publicly admitting that our current development is constrained by certain ideological shackles. And what Hunan most needs to emancipate is precisely that deeply entrenched “official-standard” mindset.
But the mind is much harder to change than institutions. Institutions can be changed by issuing documents, but habits are embedded in the bone.
Take the matter of economic cooperation with Africa. The state has placed the pilot zone for in-depth China-Africa economic and trade cooperation in Hunan — this is actually a very precise and good card. Hunan’s construction machinery and agricultural machinery, for example, the farm equipment from my hometown Shuangfeng — sturdy, durable, and low-cost — are naturally suited for African markets still in the early stages of infrastructure development.
But what about reality? On the civilian side, due to stereotypical impressions of Africa, there is generally a lot of resistance, and people fail to see the vast opportunities. On the official side, more energy is spent on hosting large forums, expos, and signing ceremonies, staying at the level of events and formalism. What is truly lacking is the kind of technocratic bureaucracy and service system that understands local laws, can smooth out customs and logistics, and helps businesses turn goods into profits. A large number of enterprises end up detouring through the coast, relying on outside traders, and doing resale business that “makes a wedding dress for others.”
Even when a ready-made national strategy that fits the province’s own industrial characteristics is not fully grasped or implemented solidly, this is not merely a capacity issue, but also one of willingness and inertia.
Hunanese have never lacked drive; what they lack is a reason to bring that drive home
If you only look at the performance of Hunanese, you would never think this land lacks vitality.
The Shao merchants, who emerged from the Baoqing Prefecture area once considered the “most difficult to govern” in Hunan, now lead globally in small-commodity businesses like lighters, luggage, and wigs. The Hunan business networks spread across the country and overseas have never lacked market acumen and survival resilience. In scientific research, the number of Hunan-born academicians and young scholars in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering consistently ranks among the top in the nation.
Sometimes when I attend fellow-townsman gatherings in Guangdong, the one thing we keep coming back to with the most emotion is: why do Hunanese thrive everywhere else, yet our hometown always falls short?
The answer everyone gives is strikingly consistent: bureaucracy.
The outflow of talent and capital, in the final analysis, is because the local environment has not yet formed one where rules prevail over personal connections, service replaces management, and long-term expectations outweigh short-term uncertainties.
Those successful entrepreneurs outside are not unwilling to return. They are waiting for a signal — a signal that makes them believe that “once back home, they can get things done without having to hand out cigarettes.”
Hunan’s GDP being overtaken by Anhui by 30 billion yuan is not frightening at all. Given Hunan’s size, if it really wants to catch up, a slight rebound in industry could bring it back.
What is truly frightening are those daily moments that make young people silently book southbound high-speed rail tickets, and those moments when entrepreneurs decide late at night to build their next factory in another province.
What Hunan needs to recover is never that 30 billion yuan, but an entire generation’s confidence in this land.
The prescription has indeed been written. The direction of the “Three Highlands and Four New Missions” is clear, the policies from the central government are ample, and the vitality of the people has never died out. The only thing left to do now is to take the medicines that have been prescribed for twenty years — even earlier than the rest of the country — seriously, one dose after another. Do not coat them with a sugar shell of formalism, and do not secretly spit them out because they taste bitter.
This requires a true self-revolution that reaches deep into habits.
And this revolution, no one can accomplish on behalf of the Hunanese.