Xichong County

Xichong is a traditional farm county — grain and oil, sericulture and well salt through history, with a thin industrial base; after 1949 only small agricultural machinery repair and grain-oil processing shops. In 2011 the chain leader Jiutian Vacuum landed and the industry started; over the following decade the county recruited suppliers through the leader and extended the chain, building the full "vacuum generation — vacuum application — vacuum instruments and parts" chain. It was recognised as a provincial SME specialty cluster in 2023 and made the national list in 2025. Organic farming won fame in parallel, with the north-east Sichuan organic agricultural deep-processing park built jointly by province, city and county.

The Xichong ETDZ has 8.5 km² built up, with four clusters: high-end equipment manufacturing (vacuum), electronic information, biopharmaceuticals, and deep agricultural processing. Twenty-seven vacuum-related firms have gathered with nearly 200 independent IP rights, supplying aerospace, semiconductor and nuclear fusion programmes; Taiji Pharmaceutical and Tongguang Optical Cable lead their clusters. In the first half of 2026 the high-end equipment manufacturing cluster's output grew 39.7% year on year.

Jiutian Vacuum (vacuum equipment chain leader), Yutian Vacuum, Taiji Pharmaceutical (biopharma), Tongguang Optical Cable (electronic information), Yuanwei Machinery, and the cluster of organic agricultural deep processors.

Xichong's maintenance demand mixes high precision with down-to-earth work. At vacuum equipment firms the precision machining, welding and leak-test stations demand extreme accuracy and cleanliness: CNC machine calibration, vacuum set maintenance and helium leak-test system servicing are frequent, high-value work — and downtime at these plants directly affects delivery of national-level orders. Biopharma granulation, tableting and packaging lines need validation-style maintenance; organic food processors keep steady demand for hygienic upkeep of cleaning, sorting and cold chain equipment. Most firms in the vacuum cluster are technical SMEs with weak in-house repair capability and high openness to outsourcing, and word travels fast inside the cluster — serve one well and the rest of the chain follows.