The newly built Shenzhen Financial Centre (CHEN ZONGLIE)

After nearly a decade of burgeoning growth, the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, now covering a 61 square kilometre area, has transformed itself from a small seaboard town into a modern city. By the sweat of their brow, builders of this brand-new metroplis have begun to harvest the fruit of their work.

As a testing ground of China's reform and openning up policy, Shenzhen, across from Hong Kong, has set up more than 2,300 foreign-invested enterprises with a total capital of $2.3 billion, or about one-seventh of the sum total that foreign businesses invested in China.

Shenzhen's industrial output value was over 10 billion yuan, of which the output value of export commodities made up more than 60 percent. Its total export volume last year reached $1.85 billion, second only to Shanghai, among China's coastal cities.

With its increasing economic sinews, Shenzhen has contributed tremendously to the state. Statistics show that since its establishment, the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone has turned over to the state a total profit of 800 million yuan as well as $82 million in foreign exchange.

Shenzhen has also increased its ability to weather fluctuations in the market. In recent years, acting on the Party Central Committee's policy of economic rectification and deepening of reform, Shenzhen has reduced the scale of capital construction while keeping its main economic targets.

In terms of industrial production, Shenzhen's total industrial output value from January to August this year reached 6.844 billion yuan, 32.9 percent over the same period last year; the export of industrial products to-talled 3.927 billion yuan, an increase of 48.8 percent.

The prosperous Shenzhen, like China's other special economic zones, is exerting more and more influence on China's reform and open policy.