Fuling District · Industrial Robot Technology Services

Fuling has two industrial main threads. The first is zhacai (pickled mustard tuber): Fuling zhacai was born in 1898; in early 1950, the state-run Fuling Zhacai Plant was organized on the basis of the former bureaucrat-capitalist vegetable factories; the company was formally established in 1988 and listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2010. The second is Third Front construction: in 1966 the state sited Project 816 at Baitao in Fuling — China's second nuclear raw-material industrial base. More than 60,000 builders excavated "the world's largest man-made cave complex" in Baitao town. Construction was halted in 1984; state-run Plant 816 then converted from military to civilian production, introducing a large chemical-fertilizer production line and becoming Chongqing Jianfeng Chemical General Plant, for a time China's largest urea production base. The technical and talent foundation of Fuling's chemical industry was formed here. In the early years of Chongqing as a municipality, Fuling's industry was summed up as the "nine golden flowers" — a pack of cigarettes, a box of medicine, a plate of zhacai, a bag of fertilizer, a brick, a bolt of cloth, a component, an aluminum ingot and a bottle of water — small in scale and dispersed, with gross industrial output of only 4.7 billion yuan. In 2010, Zhejiang's Huafeng Group settled in Baitao as the first 10-billion-yuan-class enterprise in the paired-assistance program for Fuling. It has landed 23 project phases, generating over 200 billion yuan in output value and over 30 billion yuan in profits and taxes, and building the world's largest adipic acid and single-line spandex production bases, drawing a batch of Zhejiang enterprises such as Wankai and Kalai to follow. Beyond Project 816, the Third Front line also left behind skilled-worker teams in nuclear industry and chemicals — the technical and talent foundation of Fuling's chemical industry was formed here; from 2010, Zhejiang enterprises including Huafeng, Wankai and Kalai settled in Baitao along this talent chain.

In 2025, Fuling's GDP reached 178.3 billion yuan, up 6.7%, ranking third in the city by total volume, with per capita GDP exceeding 160,000 yuan. Above-scale industrial output surpassed 290 billion yuan, up 7.6%; above-scale industrial value added grew 9.2%, and industrial investment rose 10.6%. The materials industry is the largest pillar, with output of 153.1 billion yuan — first in the city and nearly one-quarter of the citywide total. Food and agricultural product processing reached 35.98 billion yuan, also first in the city, and cumulative shale gas output ranks first nationwide. Fuling Industrial Park was upgraded to a national-level ETDZ; Baitao Industrial Park entered the national top 70 competitive chemical industry parks; and the comprehensive bonded zone achieved full-scope enclosed operation. The district has seven 10-billion-yuan-class enterprises. Huafeng Chongqing Spandex was named the first "Lighthouse Factory" in the global chemical fiber industry, and 271 Zhejiang-invested enterprises generated 69.58 billion yuan in above-scale industrial output in 2025, up 13.2% — about one-quarter of the district's above-scale industrial output. In agriculture, stem mustard (qingcaitou) planting area has remained stable at 730,000 mu, with output of 1.7 million tons and comprehensive output value of 13.2 billion yuan, all first in China. Full-chain output values for zhacai, medicinal herbs and eco-livestock reached 16 billion, 6 billion and 9 billion yuan respectively. The leading-enterprise structure is clear: Huafeng Chongqing Spandex is the first "Lighthouse Factory" in the global chemical fiber industry; Jianfeng Chemical grew out of Plant 816's military-to-civilian conversion; and Taiji Group's Fuling Pharmaceutical Plant became the world's first traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) industrial "Lighthouse Factory" in 2026. Cumulative shale gas output ranks first nationwide, providing feedstock support for natural gas chemicals.

Fuling is one of the most highly automated districts or counties in Chongqing for agricultural product processing. Fuling Zhacai Group put its first fully automated production line into service in 2004 and the industry's first intelligent production line in 2019, and now operates 13 automated lines at the 10,000-ton class. In the workshops, stepless-speed cutting machines, drum-type screening machines, three-stage desalination machines, centrifugal dewatering machines and automatic metering-and-mixing machines work in coordination with ABB industrial robots, bag-gripping robots and palletizing robots; after packaging, products are automatically case-sealed and palletized into the high-bay warehouse. In 2024 the group invested more than 70 million yuan in technical upgrades: daily output in the fresh-crisp workshop rose from 8,000 to 10,000 cases, the shred pass rate climbed from 74% to 85%, and metering deviation is under 1 gram. In January 2025 it released the world's first AI intelligent fiber-stripping machine for zhacai. On the industrial side, 2025 saw 10 new smart factories and 4 newly cultivated "future factories" (first in the city); "industrial brains" were built for three sub-sectors — zhacai, modern TCM and polymer synthetic materials — and Fuling was selected as a national pilot city for SME digital transformation. On the agricultural side, the tea plantation in Wuyao Village, Linshi Subdistrict, deployed an AI grading-and-weighing robot for fresh tea leaves, with 95% recognition accuracy, more than a 10-fold efficiency gain and a labor cost reduction of over 60%. In terms of equipment, Fuling Zhacai's intelligent workshop is built around stepless-speed cutting machines, three-stage desalination machines, centrifugal dewatering machines, automatic metering-and-mixing machines, pasteurizing water-bath sterilization and cooling machines, together with ABB industrial robots, bag-gripping robots and palletizing robots: cutting and desalting 10,000 kg of zhacai takes one hour, boxing 120 bags takes just one minute, and annual capacity is nearly 10 times the pre-retrofit level.