Changsha county, in Central China’s Hunan province, is a sub-district of Changsha city, the provincial capital, and covers a 1,997-square-kilometer area with 18 towns and 228 villages. It has a population of 979,000.

The county government has made it one of 18 national ‘reform and opening-up’ areas and it has a plan to build itself into a sub-center of the city of Changsha up to 2020.

The county has well-connected and convenient transportation, with the Changsha-Yong’an Highway, Airport Expressway, Belt Expressway, the provincial road S103, national highway 107, Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao Highway, and the Wuhan-Guangzhou railway all running across it.

More importantly, it is home to the Changsha Huanghua International Airport and only eight kilometers away from both the Changsha Railway Station and the Xiangjiang River Port. The city’s subway Line 2A will open to service before 2020, connecting the Xingsha-Mapoling center and the Wuguangxin station.

The county is focused on industrial development to the south and agriculture to the north, with new industrialization methods for urbanization and agricultural modernization. The county has given special attention to innovation for industrial transformation and upgrading and is working to become a leader in construction machinery and automobile development.

It has set up 10 business investment sites and established favorable policies for modern services through 19 project agreements signed in 2011 worth 40 billion yuan. The county also has its sights on improved agricultural productivity and had 6.7 billion yuan worth of agriculture output in 2010.

It got approval for a national modern agriculture demonstration zone, and began work on 37 modern farms and increased the number of agricultural produce enterprises to 55. The county also looked for strategic investors, industry chains, and a better industrial structure and introduced 26 Fortune 500 companies by the end of June 2011, and did $7 billion worth of foreign trade.

In 2010, it had a GDP of 63 billion yuan, up 17.9 percent year-on-year, and with annual growth of 17.3 percent for five consecutive years. It also had the following: 116.9 billion yuan in industrial output value, up 31.6 percent; 7.5 billion yuan in revenues, up 38.7 percent; 14.1 billion yuan in retail sales, up 28.6 percent; more than 21,000 yuan in per capita income for urbanites, up 13.6 percent; and 11,180 yuan in per capita income for rural people, up 19.7 percent.

The county ranked 31st in scientific development among China’s small and medium-sized cities in 2010, and 18th in economic competitiveness in 2011. It was named China’s happiest city to live in for two consecutive years, and won the China Habitat Environment Award twice. It is also known as a garden city and civilized county.