Different focuses

Individuality is key, with each area drawing from its location to uniquely specialize in industries that fit it best.

Shanghai, for example, is continuing its path to becoming one of the world's leading financial centers, spearheaded by experiments in the city's FTZ.

By November, 41 renowned international financial institutions had set up 56 asset management companies in the Lujiazui Financial City area of the Shanghai Pilot FTZ.

Meanwhile, just a few kilometers away, the Zhejiang Pilot FTZ is going a wholly different route and is instead focusing on China's oil and gas industries.

"The FTZ has been pushing forward the construction of an international oil base in the zone, and the first phase of it, with 20 million metric tons of refining capacity, will start testing by the end of this year," said Xia Wenzhong, deputy head of Zhejiang Pilot FTZ.

"Currently the storage capacity has reached 22.7 million cubic meters, one of the biggest of its kind in the country, and we plan to increase it to 40 million cubic meters by 2020."

In all, the Zhejiang FTZ is expecting to handle 20 million tons of oil products this year, worth in excess of 80 billion yuan. By 2020, the figure is expected to rise to 300 billion yuan.

Unlike the earlier reforms, which were largely centered on the eastern coast, this new round of reform is including inland provinces.

In 2017, five inland provincial regions, all major transportation hubs in the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, signed up in an effort to promote the country's undeveloped interior regions and facilitate the B&R Initiative.

In the Chongqing FTZ, an international logistics system has been formed, connecting the city with the Pacific in the east, Europe in the west, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the south and Russia in the north.

Northwestern China's Shaanxi Pilot FTZ is devoted to developing modern agriculture. It has China's first hightech agricultural industry demonstration zone in Yangling. The area led the research and development of agricultural technologies in arid and semi-arid regions in China and cooperated with countries in similar climate conditions along the Belt and Road.