Guangdong announced its first batch of small-city pilot towns on May 11 in Guangzhou, with Zhongshan's Tanzhou town making the list.

That same day, a 389-million-yuan modern modern agriculture and food processing industrial park started construction in Tanzhou's Xinqianjin Village. Home to about 428 thousand permanent residents, Tanzhou is steadily building the confidence to make the leap to pursue city-level development.

Under the provincial plan, the 20 selected towns, all with solid industrial bases and strong growth potential, will no longer be positioned as ordinary towns. Instead, they will be planned, built and governed in line with small-city standards, with industry development, public services and urban management benchmarked against urban standards.

By the end of 2025, Tanzhou's built-up area was home to 376 thousand permanent residents, with an urbanization rate of 88%. Its GDP reached 18.52 billion yuan, up 5.32% year-on-year, ranking sixth in Zhongshan, while annual public fiscal revenue stood at 1.412 billion yuan. The town had laid some 370 km of main sewage pipelines, and its sewage treatment capacity had jumped to 150,000 tonnes per day.