4-Day Shenzhen Smart City Tour: Digital Government & Qianhai

Morning — Arrival & Lianhuashan Park
Meet your guide and driver at Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport (SZX) and transfer to your hotel in the Futian CBD, with early check-in available on request. Then visit Lianhuashan Park to see the statue of Deng Xiaoping, architect of China's reform and opening-up, with a panoramic view of the Futian skyline.

Afternoon — Shenzhen Museum & Bay Park Cycle
Visit the Shenzhen Museum of History and Folk Culture to learn how the city transformed from a small fishing village into a tech metropolis since 1980. Later enjoy a guided bicycle ride along Shenzhen Bay Park, with views of mangroves and the Hong Kong skyline across the water.

Evening — Ping An Finance Centre & Dinner
Ascend to the Free Sky 116 observatory at the Ping An Finance Centre, Shenzhen's tallest building at 599 meters, for 360-degree night views over the illuminated city and harbor. Your guide can recommend a restaurant in the vibrant COCO Park or Futian area for dinner.

Morning — Qianhai Cooperation Zone
Visit the Qianhai Shenzhen–Hong Kong Modern Service Industry Cooperation Zone, a special area launched in 2010 to pilot innovative policies and attract international firms seeking a foothold in China's market. Learn about preferential tax and regulatory experiments that position Qianhai as a gateway for foreign investment and a laboratory for China's next wave of economic reform. The zone's proximity to Hong Kong makes it a strategic bridge between the two systems.

Afternoon — Smart Manufacturing Tour
Tour a Shenzhen manufacturing company that exemplifies the city's shift from low-cost production to high-value manufacturing and innovation. See how automation, robotics, and digital technologies are transforming production lines and creating new business models in traditional industries. Shenzhen, which became a Special Economic Zone in 1980, has grown from a fishing village into a global hardware and electronics hub in just four decades.

Evening — Shekou Sea World Dinner
Enjoy dinner at a restaurant in the Shekou Sea World area, a waterfront district with a strong international community and diverse dining options. The evening offers time to discuss how Shenzhen's innovation ecosystem might inform your own business strategies and potential partnerships.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner.

Accommodation Options
4-Star: Crowne Plaza Shenzhen | DoubleTree by Hilton Shenzhen | Novotel Shenzhen Bao'an.
5-Star: The St. Regis Shenzhen | Shangri-La Shenzhen | Ritz-Carlton Shenzhen.

Morning — the city operations centre
Shenzhen is unusual among Chinese cities in that it was planned and built after 1980, and its management systems were designed with it rather than retrofitted. The morning is spent inside the operations centre, where the feeds the city runs on are brought together on one wall: traffic signals re-timed in response to live demand, water and power distribution, construction-site monitoring, and the dispatch side of emergency response. The point to watch for is not the screens but the decision rights behind them — which incidents the platform is allowed to resolve automatically, and which still require a person to sign off.

Afternoon — digital government and two technology firms
After lunch, a briefing on the digital government systems that residents and companies actually use: the single municipal app that carries most routine public services, the data-sharing rules that let one department's record serve another, and the limits placed on what can be joined up. The rest of the afternoon is given to two companies in the urban systems field — one working in sensors and edge devices, one in data platforms and city-scale analytics — with access to the people who build the products rather than a sales presentation. Groups are asked to bring one problem from their own city and put it to both firms.

Evening — At Your Leisure
The evening is free. Your guide will suggest restaurants near the hotel and can arrange transport back into the Futian or Nanshan districts if the group wants to keep working over dinner.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Accommodation
Futian or Nanshan district, Shenzhen.

Morning — the exchange and the funding scene
Shenzhen's exchange was opened in 1990 and has become the listing venue of choice for the country's technology and small-cap companies, which makes it a useful counterweight to the state-led picture groups will have formed elsewhere. The morning is a visit and a briefing: how the market is structured, what the listing process demands of a technology company, and how the venture funds in the surrounding districts feed companies into it. The session is deliberately kept to the mechanics, since most delegations are trying to judge whether the route is open to a firm of their own size.

Midday — the Greater Bay Area briefing and departure
The programme closes over a working lunch with a short briefing on the Greater Bay Area: what the framework does about moving data, people and capital between Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao, which of those flows is genuinely frictionless now and which is not, and what a company outside China would need to do to use the arrangement. Your guide then assists with check-out and the private transfer to Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport, or to Futian station for the high-speed rail link to Hong Kong West Kowloon if the trip is being extended.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch included.