BMW Brilliance Automotive, the German automaker's joint venture in China, opened its third plant in Shenyang at the end of 2018. The move made the company the first beneficiary after China substantially eased foreign ownership limits in the auto industry.

Besides BBA, Saudi Arabian Oil Co, or Saudi Aramco, also announced in February that it would invest $10 billion to develop a fully integrated refining and petrochemical complex in Panjin, a city in Liaoning.

The project will include a 300,000-barrel-per-day refinery with a 1.5 million metric tons per annum ethylene cracker. Saudi Aramco will supply up to 70 percent of the crude feedstock for the complex, which is expected to be operational in 2024.

Suning Holdings Group, China's largest omnichannel retailer by sales revenue, plans to run around 600 smart retail outlets by 2020 in Liaoning to coincide with the local government's efforts to restructure its economy.

Shen said the flexible six-cable parallel link system, which took Dalian Huarui Heavy Industry Group four years to design, manufacture and install, is one of the three major technological breakthroughs of China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), located in Southwest China's Guizhou province.

The 30-ton feed cabin is suspended by six cables from six concrete towers on the surrounding hills, realizing long-span instantaneous and accurate positioning of the cabin, revolutionizing the previous rigid support model between feed source and reflector in radio telescopes, said Wei Xufeng, vice-president of DHHI Group.

Supported by more than 10,000 employees, the Dalian-based SOE has entered 91 countries and regions such as Australia, South Africa and Italy with its products serving sectors including metallurgy, mining, ports, shipbuilding, energy and aerospace.

Encouraged by these new growth points, Liaoning saw its foreign trade jump 11.8 percent year-on-year to 754.73 billion yuan ($107 billion) in 2018, while its trade in services rose by 6 percent year-on-year to $18 billion, ranking among the top eight provinces in China, data from Liaoning Provincial Bureau of Statistics show.

Because many foreign companies fear unfair competition from SOEs and local protectionism, the key for Liaoning to gain more foreign investment is to continue to eliminate negative factors and allow global players to enter more industries that were previously monopolized by SOEs, said Zhang Yunling, former director of international studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

He said this will not only generate fairer competition for foreign companies, but also attract more private investment to the province. On the other hand, Liaoning's modern agriculture and service base, and national-level research institutes in many fields and universities can also be attractive to global companies.

Under the government plan, Liaoning will improve its transportation infrastructure by investing 10 billion yuan this year to better serve the real economy and regional connectivity. It will rebuild 4,000 kilometers of rural roads and expand logistics facilities to handle another 10 million tons of rail cargo and 88,000 more containers by both rail and water.