Chongqing Municipality

Chongqing opened as a treaty port with a customs house in 1891, becoming the earliest trading port on the upper Yangtze; foreign trading houses, match factories, silk-reeling and weaving mills lined the river, and Chuanjiang steamship routes tied Chongqing to Wuhan and Shanghai. During the late-Qing New Policies the city set up modern industrial and mining enterprises such as the Copper Yuan Bureau, electricity and waterworks began, and machinery-repair workshops appeared in Jiangbei and Nan'an. The commercial capital and modern transport that the treaty port brought gave late-Qing Chongqing the embryo of a south-west industrial and commercial centre.

In 1937 the Nationalist Government moved its capital to Chongqing, and this mountain city became the political and industrial nerve centre of wartime China. Large numbers of ordnance and basic-industry installations were sited here: the Ordnance Administration's 21st Arsenal (the relocated Jinling Arsenal), the 20th Arsenal, and the Steel Plant Relocation Committee (the Hanyang Iron Works and Daye ore equipment moved west to Dadukou — the forerunner of Chongqing Iron & Steel). Over a thousand private factories moved into eastern Sichuan, and textile, machinery, chemical and smelting capacity expanded sharply. To escape air raids, plants were tunnelled into the hills and dispersed — forming Chongqing's distinctive "cave factory" pattern. Over eight years of resistance Chongqing contributed a large share of the rear area's ordnance and steel output, and laid the industrial foundation for the decades that followed.

From 1964 the Third Front programme designated Chongqing the centre of the conventional-ordnance base among the "two bases and one line". Backbone enterprises — Changan Machine Works, Jianshe Machine Tool Plant, Jialing Machine Factory, Wangjiang Machine Works, Qingshan Industrial — were expanded or newly built, with supporting steel (Chonggang), chemicals, machinery and shipbuilding laid out in step; at Baitao in Fuling, the 816 underground nuclear project excavated a world-class artificial cavern. Third Front-era Chongqing held a complete ordnance chain from small arms, artillery and vehicles to optical instruments and special steels — to this day an important national base for military-civilian integration.

Chongqing became a directly administered municipality in 1997, and the rebuilding of its old industrial base ran in step with enterprise relocation: Chonggang moved to Changshou for environmental reasons, ordnance-group enterprises were restructured, and Changan shifted from defence work to mini-cars and sedans, growing into a national vehicle leader. Around 2008 Chongqing used a "vertical integration" model to bring in laptop brands and contract manufacturers, building the world's largest notebook production base; Liangjiang New Area was established, with vehicles and electronic information as twin drivers. Traditional clusters — motorcycles (Loncin, Zongshen, Lifan), general machinery, chemicals-pharma (the Changshou chemical park) — kept upgrading.

Construction of the Chengdu-Chongqing twin-city economic circle began in 2020, and by 2025 the two economies together broke CNY 10 trillion. With the "33618" modern manufacturing cluster system as its main thread, Chongqing built 2.7877 million vehicles (1.2961 million NEVs, up 36%), and Seres with its AITO series became the emblem of intelligent connected NEVs; leaders such as Changan, BOE, the Chemical-Pharma Holdings Group and Chongqing Machinery & Electronics pull the component and materials supply chain. From Dadukou steel to Liangjiang New Area's vehicles and panels, from the 816 cavern to the Western (Chongqing) Science City, Chongqing's industry has made the leap from wartime ordnance to intelligent manufacturing.