“Harbin is a major city in far-north China, with a population of 10 million and over 4 million in the city center. (…) And it is influenced a lot by Russia, especially in architecture and food.” This is how our team opened its brief market research on Harbin in July 2012. The same week, we wrote that Zhengzhou, “situated between Luoyang and Kaifeng, was a purpose-built capital city” which “stood out in this relatively poor province”, and that Chinese students “have time and energy to try a new brand”. Most of the figures of that summer have aged; the observations much less.
In 2025, Harbin attracted USD 190 million of foreign direct investment, more than twice the USD 78.8 million that went to Zhengzhou, a city whose economy is two and a half times bigger, according to the 2025 statistical bulletin of Harbin (哈尔滨市统计公报) and the 2025 statistical bulletin of Zhengzhou (郑州市统计公报). The same year, Zhengzhou exported about seventeen times more than Harbin. These two numbers say a lot about how a company should think its investment in China outside Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen: the size of a city tells you little, what matters is the job you want the city to do for you.
That July, our team published short series on China’s macro economy, on Harbin’s economy, on the Zhengzhou metropolitan area in Henan, on a young messaging app called Weixin, and on cosmetics among Chinese university students. We have now merged them into one analysis, because read together they answer the questions our clients still ask before investing: in which economic cycle, which city, which first customer, and which channel to keep that customer.
China investment strategy: Harbin and Zhengzhou in 2025, key figures
Zhengzhou is a large export and logistics economy; Harbin is a smaller economy that lives more and more from services and tourism. The table below compares the two capitals on the official 2025 data.
| Indicator (2025) | Harbin (Heilongjiang) | Zhengzhou (Henan) |
|---|---|---|
| GDP | RMB 618.9 billion (+4.6%) | RMB 1,524.5 billion (+5.4%) |
| GDP per resident (our calculation) | about RMB 62,600 | about RMB 116,000 |
| Resident population, end of 2025 | 9.89 million | 13.14 million |
| Services as a share of GDP | 67.9% | 62.2% |
| Retail sales of consumer goods | RMB 255.8 billion (+4.0%) | RMB 662.9 billion (+5.0%) |
| Foreign trade | RMB 50.3 billion (+4.1%) | RMB 650.2 billion (+16.8%) |
| Exports | RMB 24.4 billion (-7.1%) | RMB 427.6 billion (+20.3%) |
| Utilized foreign direct investment | USD 190 million (+18.1%) | USD 78.8 million (-56.9%) |
| Urban disposable income per capita | RMB 46,915 (+4.8%) | RMB 52,413 (+3.8%) |
| College students in school | 815,000 (50 universities) | 1.45 million (undergraduate and junior college) |
Source: 2025 statistical bulletins of Harbin and Zhengzhou (preliminary data), compiled by Daxue Consulting. Per-resident figures are our calculations.
For reference, China’s GDP passed RMB 140 trillion in 2025, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, for a population of 1.405 billion (NBS), which puts the national average at roughly RMB 100,000 per person (our calculation). In other terms, Zhengzhou sits above the national average and Harbin clearly below it, even though Harbin’s growth in consumption and tourism has been one of the stories of the last three winters.
The macro backdrop: from the 2008 stimulus to an economy with flat prices
China’s economy in 2026 grows more slowly than in 2012, with flat consumer prices and a shrinking property sector, which makes the choice of city and category more important than the national average. “Over the past several years, China has been a major contributor to the world economy,” our 2012 series on China’s macro economy began. It described what it called a zigzag path: the RMB 4 trillion stimulus announced on November 9, 2008, then overheating, food prices rising by double digits, and a tightening in which the reserve requirement ratio went from 16% in 2010 to 21% in 2011. Its author concluded with a forecast: “I look for a 8% to 9% growth in the country’s GDP this year, which is lower than the year before.” Growth in 2012 came in just under 8%.
The 2025 figures from the National Bureau of Statistics describe a different economy. GDP grew 5.0%, the consumer price index was flat (0%), investment in real estate development fell 17.2% and total fixed-asset investment fell 3.8%, while exports rose 6.1%. Per capita disposable income grew 5.0% and the urbanization rate reached 67.89%. In other terms, the old engine of credit and construction that our 2012 author already doubted (“it cannot be maintained indefinitely”) has slowed down, and growth now depends more on exports and on household consumption.
What strikes us when re-reading the 2012 recommendations is how current they still sound: moving manufacturing from labor-intensive to technology-intensive production, and reforming healthcare and education so that households save less and spend more. For an investor, the practical consequence is that national averages hide very different local cycles. Zhengzhou rides the export engine; Harbin rides consumption and tourism. This is why we look at the two cities separately below.
Zhengzhou: a trade and logistics machine more than an FDI magnet
Zhengzhou’s growth now comes from exports, air cargo and car manufacturing, while new foreign investment into the city has fallen sharply. In 2025 its exports rose 20.3% to RMB 427.6 billion, cargo and mail at the airport reached 1.03 million tonnes (+25.2%), and the city produced 1.2 million vehicles (+9.6%), according to the Zhengzhou statistics bureau. BYD’s Zhengzhou plant is among the large industrial projects that landed in the province, as China News Service noted when Henan’s 2025 GDP came out at RMB 6.66 trillion (+5.6%). Zhengzhou alone weighs about 23% of Henan’s GDP (our calculation).
In 2012 we described Zhengzhou as a capital with transport links to almost every major Chinese city, and we forecast a metropolitan area of 8 to 10 million people by 2020. The city itself (not the wider metropolitan area) had 13.14 million residents at the end of 2025. Henan as a whole is going the other way: its population fell from 99.41 million in 2020 to 97.85 million at the end of 2024, as Jiemian (界面新闻) reported from the provincial bulletin. Zhengzhou is absorbing the province, which is exactly what the post-2000 policy of a “larger Zhengzhou” aimed for.
The surprise is on investment. Actual utilized FDI dropped 56.9% to USD 78.8 million in 2025. One could argue that foreign groups already present (the Foxconn campus that assembles a large share of the world’s iPhones is the best known) reinvest through existing entities, which official FDI does not fully capture. Still, the message for a newcomer is that Zhengzhou is a city where foreign companies ship and sell, much more than one where they set up new plants.
Harbin attracted more than twice Zhengzhou’s foreign direct investment in 2025, while Zhengzhou exported about seventeen times more than Harbin.
Henan, where Chinese retail has been rethought
Our 2012 article on Zhengzhou’s service sector was about department stores: Dennis (丹尼斯), Dashang and the new central business district planned in East Zhengzhou. Its author described his own neighborhood in the east of the city: “There are two big department stores within 200 meters and 5 more within 2000 meters”, and he expected that “in the following 10 years, CBD will witness department stores springing up quickly”. The retailers that made Henan famous since then are of another kind. Pangdonglai (胖东来 in Chinese), a grocery and department store group with a little over ten stores in two Henan cities, passed RMB 20 billion of sales by November 8, 2025, against RMB 17 billion for the whole of 2024, according to Jiemian. Yonghui, which was THE retail chain when I arrived in China in 2009, closed 381 stores in 2025 and rebuilt hundreds of others on the Pangdonglai model, as Beijing Daily reported. We have written about this case in more detail in our analysis of Pang Dong Lai’s success story.
The other Henan story was born in Zhengzhou in 1997. Mixue Group ended 2025 with 59,823 stores worldwide, revenue of RMB 33.56 billion (+35.2%) and about 58% of its mainland stores in tier-3 and lower cities, according to its annual results summarized by Wallstreetcn (华尔街见闻). For a foreign brand, Henan is less a market to “enter” than a place to learn how to sell at low price points with very high service standards. Our article on how Mixue scales across emerging-tier cities goes further on the franchise model.
Harbin: from heavy industry to an ice-and-snow economy
Harbin today is a services economy in which tourism plays a role our 2012 analysis did not anticipate. Services made 50.9% of its GDP in 2010, as we wrote at the time; the share reached 67.9% in 2025, according to the Harbin bulletin. Nominal GDP went from RMB 366.6 billion in 2010 to RMB 618.9 billion in 2025, which is a slower pace than Zhengzhou and than China as a whole.
“Due to its long and cold winter, Harbin is also well-known for its winter culture,” we wrote in 2012, and yet the same series listed the cold among the city’s weaknesses. The city has flipped the script. After Harbin went viral on Chinese social media in the winter of 2023-2024 (we covered the “Harbin, you’re going viral” hashtag at the time), the 2024-2025 ice-and-snow season brought 90.36 million visits (+9.7%) and RMB 137.2 billion of tourism spending (+16.6%), with inbound visitors up 94.2%, according to Xinhua. The 9th Asian Winter Games, held in Harbin in February 2025, came with more than 500 new ice venues and upgraded trails at 15 ski resorts. “The Central Street, also known as Kitaiskaia St., is a representation of different architectural styles,” our 2012 guide noted; during the 2025-2026 season it received more than 400,000 visits a day on average, and the Ice and Snow World received 3.06 million visitors in 65 days, and revenue of key ice-and-snow equipment makers rose 42% in 2025, as Xinhua reported in July 2026.
However, this does not mean Harbin has become a rich consumer market. Retail sales per resident were about RMB 25,900 in 2025, half of Zhengzhou’s RMB 50,500 (our calculation from the two bulletins), and part of Harbin’s spending is brought by visitors over a few winter months. Local habits are more modest: in 2012 we wrote that “people often start the night at a cheap Shaokao or Hotpot restaurant with some bottles of Hapi”, the local beer, and this is still a fair description of a Harbin evening out. Exports fell 7.1% while imports rose 17.3%. Trade with Belt and Road countries represented 78.5% of the city’s total, according to the same Xinhua report. The Russian border, which we listed in 2012 as Harbin’s main opportunity, still shapes this trade, although the sources we checked do not publish a Russia-only figure for the city.
On FDI, Harbin reported USD 700 million in 2010 in our original article and USD 190 million in 2025. Definitions and the inclusion of the development zones may have changed in between, so we would not read too much into the exact gap; the direction is clear, though. Investors who come today are smaller and more targeted, often around tourism, food processing and the winter-sports supply chain we describe in our article on the Chinese ski market. For the wider regional context, our analysis of the Dongbei Renaissance is a useful complement.
The first customer: university students, still a test market
University students remain the easiest group to test a product with in a new city, but they are no longer a growth story by numbers. In 2012 we wrote that China had 47 million students and that the number grew every year. The Ministry of Education’s 2024 bulletin counts 48.46 million people in higher education, with a gross enrollment rate of 60.8% and 3,119 institutions. We could not trace the source of our 2012 figure, which likely used a broad definition as well. Put simply, the pool is large and stable; growth now comes from a higher enrollment rate, not from bigger cohorts.
What has changed is spending power. Students received on average RMB 1,744 a month in 2025, against RMB 1,212 in 2016, according to a MyCOS (麦可思) survey of 2,783 students reported by China News Service. In the same survey, 25.2% said they spend money on “image management” (形象管理) each month, and 98.5% had bought online in the previous six months, with more than seven orders a month on average, as relayed by World Journal from Yicai’s report. Multiplied by the 38.9 million students in regular and vocational programs, the monthly allowance alone represents an order of magnitude of RMB 800 billion a year (our rough calculation, to be read as a scale, not a market size).
Beauty is the category where this money is the most visible. Cosmetics retail sales reached RMB 465.3 billion in 2025 (+5.1%), faster than total retail sales (+3.7%), according to the National Bureau of Statistics. An industry estimate from Cosmetics Observer (化妆品观察), published by Jiemian, puts beauty e-commerce at RMB 543.9 billion (+24.8%). The two numbers do not measure the same thing (NBS only covers retailers above a size threshold), so they should not be compared directly.
Some of what we wrote in 2012 still holds. Quality was the first purchase criterion for 86% of the students we surveyed then, and, as we put it, “consumers tend to build trust more easily between peers than with advertisement.” Today the peer is a KOC on Xiaohongshu, and the quality argument has become an ingredient argument, as we describe in our article on China’s skincare market and its “skintellectuals”. For an investor in Zhengzhou (1.45 million students) or Harbin (815,000), campuses are a cheap way to test a price point and a message before opening stores.
About Daxue Consulting
Daxue Consulting is a market research and strategy consulting firm founded in Beijing, with offices in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong and more than 800 projects for over 500 clients. Our team runs city-level demand studies, store checks and consumer surveys across China, including in inland and northern cities such as Zhengzhou and Harbin.
Related reading: Consulting in China · China’s new luxury hot spots beyond Shanghai and Beijing
The channel: from Weixin 1.0 to a 1.44 billion-user operating system
WeChat is no longer a messaging app but the infrastructure where Chinese consumers are retained, served and increasingly sold to. In our 2012 figures, Mobile QQ held 57.8% of China’s mobile instant messaging market and Weixin only 2.5%. Our conclusion at the time was cautious: “So with accumulated market share grows, mobile IM structure may change in the future.” It did. Weixin and WeChat counted 1.439 billion monthly active users at June 30, 2026 (+2% year on year), and Tencent’s marketing services revenue grew 22% to RMB 43.6 billion in the second quarter, according to Tencent’s 2026 second-quarter results.
The commerce layer is more recent. Weixin Mini Shop (微信小店), upgraded from the Channels shop in 2024, saw its 2024 GMV reach 1.92 times the 2023 level, according to figures presented at WeChat’s annual Open Class and reported by Jiemian. The same source gives a profile that matters for our topic: 63% of Mini Shop users are women, 97.7% are over 25, and only 32% live in first-tier and new first-tier cities. WeChat also launched a “send a gift” (送礼物) function in December 2024, which lets a user buy a product and send it to a friend like a red envelope.
In other terms, WeChat is not where a 20-year-old student discovers a lipstick; that happens on Xiaohongshu or Douyin. WeChat is where the same customer, a few years later, buys again, joins a brand’s group chat or sends a gift to her mother in Harbin. For a brand opening in a lower-tier or inland city, this is where private traffic is built, as we explain in our guides to WeChat Mini Programs and private traffic in China.
Students are where a brand tests its product and its price; WeChat is where it keeps the customer who bought it.
What we wrote in 2012, and what still holds
| What we wrote in 2012 | Status in 2026 |
|---|---|
| “I look for a 8% to 9% growth in the country’s GDP this year” (2012) | Close: growth came in just under 8%; it was 5.0% in 2025 |
| “Shift from export-led to consumption-led growth” | Still the agenda: CPI flat and property investment down 17.2% in 2025 |
| “The Zhengzhou metropolitan area will gather 8 to 10 million people by 2020” | Exceeded: Zhengzhou city alone had 13.14 million residents at end-2025 |
| “Henan’s GDP reached RMB 3.20 trillion in 2011” | Updated: RMB 6.66 trillion in 2025 (+5.6%) |
| “Department stores are the most active sector in Henan” | Outdated: supermarkets and franchise drinks (Pangdonglai, Mixue) carry the Henan retail story |
| “Services make 50.9% of Harbin’s GDP” | Updated: 67.9% in 2025 |
| “Harbin’s cold winters are a weakness” | Reversed: ice-and-snow tourism is now a growth engine |
| “Harbin utilized USD 700 million of FDI” | Updated: USD 190 million in 2025, on possibly different definitions |
| “China has 47 million students, growing every year” | Corrected: 48.46 million in 2024, a stable pool |
| “Students trust peers more than ads” | Still true: the peers are now KOCs on Xiaohongshu |
| “Weixin holds 2.5% of mobile messaging” | Transformed: 1.44 billion monthly users and a commerce layer |
Looking back, we were right on the direction of Zhengzhou and on the power of peer recommendation among young consumers. We underestimated how much a cold northern city could earn from its winter, and we were too confident that the student population would keep growing.
Daxue Take
What we observe in our research is that city choice is too often made by tier, and not by function. Here is how we would frame it.
Choose the city for a job, not for its tier. Zhengzhou is a hub to ship, assemble and distribute. Harbin is a place to sell experiences, winter products and food, and a gateway to the North-East. The same brand may need both, for different reasons.
Read FDI against trade. Zhengzhou’s FDI fell while its exports grew 20%. Foreign capital follows existing networks there. A newcomer will usually need a local partner or distributor, a point we develop in our note on route-to-market in China.
Use students to test, not to scale. Zhengzhou’s 1.45 million students and Harbin’s 815,000 are a cheap laboratory. Test price points and messages on campus before signing a store lease.
Put WeChat after discovery. Acquire on Xiaohongshu or Douyin. Retain, re-sell and enable gifting through WeChat Mini Shop and group chats.
Benchmark against Henan retailers before importing a Shanghai format. Pangdonglai and Mixue have set the reference for service and price in inland China.
Our recommendation is simple. Before committing capital to a city, run a city-level demand check: store checks, a consumer survey and social listening on local accounts. This costs a fraction of a store opening and avoids picking the wrong city for the right product.
FAQ: investing in China beyond tier-1 cities
Is Zhengzhou a good city for a foreign company to invest in?
It depends on the activity. Zhengzhou is strong for export, logistics and manufacturing supply: exports rose 20.3% and airport cargo 25.2% in 2025. New FDI fell 56.9% the same year, so most foreign companies there work through existing partners.
Why is Harbin attracting visitors and investors again?
Ice-and-snow tourism. The 2024-2025 season brought 90.36 million visits and RMB 137.2 billion of spending, helped by the February 2025 Asian Winter Games. FDI rose 18.1% to USD 190 million in 2025.
How many university students are there in China?
The Ministry of Education counted 48.46 million people in higher education in 2024, with a gross enrollment rate of 60.8%. The number is stable; spending per student is what grows.
Is WeChat still useful to sell cosmetics in China?
Yes, but mostly for retention. Weixin and WeChat have 1.44 billion monthly users, and Mini Shop users are mainly women over 25. Discovery of beauty products happens more on Xiaohongshu and Douyin.
How should a company choose a second-tier city in China?
Start from the job the city must do (sell, produce, distribute), then compare official data on retail sales, trade and FDI, and test demand locally before investing in stores or plants.
Conclusion
As a conclusion, Harbin and Zhengzhou show two different ways for an inland or northern city to grow: Zhengzhou through trade and industry, Harbin through services and its winter. A company that invests in either needs to know which of these engines it plugs into, which young customer it tests first, and how it keeps that customer once the first purchase is made. Which of your products would pass the Harbin test, and which only the Zhengzhou one?
At Daxue Consulting, our mission is to guide businesses to holistic growth in China, through consumer research, market analysis, tech-enabled data collection and strategy consulting. Two of our values shaped this article. Intellectual humility gives clarity: re-reading our own 2012 work, we had to correct what we got wrong on students and on Harbin. And knowledge is meant to be shared, which is why we keep these city analyses open to all. To discuss what these findings mean for your investment in China, explore our market research services, our strategy consulting or contact our team.
About the author
Matthieu (马修) David-Experton is the founder and CEO of Daxue Consulting. He arrived in China in 2009 and has advised more than 400 companies on their China market strategy since then. He hosts the China Paradigm podcast. Follow Matthieu on LinkedIn.
