New City Chronicle | Officially Under Construction, The Fourth Dual-Airport City Is Coming

Ask AI · Foshan Is the Site Choice for Guangzhou’s New Airport: What Regional Synergy Strategy Is Behind It?

The Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area will welcome a new airport. On March 25, the Guangzhou New Airport project broke ground in Gaoming District, Foshan. This aviation hub will serve the west bank of the Pearl River and radiate to the western Guangdong region, officially moving from blueprint to construction.

According to the plan, the airport’s current-phase project has a total investment of 41.81B yuan, and will build 2 parallel long-distance runways, an airport terminal building with a floor area of about 260k square meters, 94 aircraft stands, and the corresponding supporting facilities. The airfield area standard will be 4E. It is expected to meet operational needs of 30 million passengers annually, 500k tons of cargo and mail annually, and 260k aircraft takeoffs and landings. The project is planned to be completed and put into operation during the “15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030)” period.

This suggests that after Shanghai, Beijing, and Chengdu, Guangzhou will become the fourth city in the country to have two large civil transport airports.

New airport design inspiration: Yueju opera headgear “Zhuangyuan Guan” From the website of the Foshan Gaoming District Government

Supporting Regional Coordination and Development in the Greater Bay Area

According to the plan, Guangzhou New Airport is a domestic civil hub airport and an important component of Guangzhou’s international aviation hub, one of the aviation hubs in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, while also performing the function of a comprehensive transportation hub in the western part of the Greater Bay Area.

What is worth noting is that although it is called “Guangzhou New Airport,” its site is actually located in Gaoming District, Foshan—right at the geographic center among the four cities of Foshan, Zhaoqing, Jiangmen, and Yunfu. It will directly serve the Guangzhou–Foshan–Zhaoqing–Jiangmen area and surrounding population of over 20 million. In the future, it will mainly meet aviation demand for the city cluster on the west bank of the Pearl River.

For a long time, the airport clusters in the Greater Bay Area have shown a clearly defined pattern of “strong in the east and weak in the west.” By placing the new airport on the west bank of the Pearl River, it will change this situation to a certain extent, provide a high-level open platform for the development of the west-bank city cluster, and also help advance regional coordination and development across the entire Greater Bay Area.

Similar site selections have precedents. For example, in the eastern Guangdong region, the Jieyang Chaoshan International Airport, which was completed and opened to operations in 2011, is located at the geographic center of the three cities of Shantou, Chaozhou, and Jieyang, and mainly serves the entire Chaoshan region.

In fact, as super projects and traffic gateways, the planning and construction of large airports have never been limited to considerations for just one city or one specific area. Using an airport’s leverage effect to drive regional development is an important motivation behind many cities building a second airport.

For instance, Beijing Daxing Airport is located at the border area between Daxing District and Langfang, Hebei, which can effectively serve coordinated development of Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei. Chengdu Tianfu Airport is laid out in Jianyang, aligning with the construction of the Chengdu–Chongqing economic circle and the development of the eastern new area. The construction of the Pudong Airport back then also matched the needs for Pudong’s development and opening up. Shanghai’s third airport, located in Nantong, similarly reflects the direction of integrated development in the Yangtze River Delta.

Therefore, the construction of Guangzhou New Airport and its special site selection will not only add capacity to the Greater Bay Area’s aviation hub, but will also bring new benefits to optimizing the overall development layout of the entire Greater Bay Area.

Aerial photo (drone image) of the location of Guangzhou New Airport on March 24. Xinhua News Agency Photo

More and More “Small Cities” Are Accelerating Airport Construction

According to the Civil Aviation Administration of China’s “Statistical Bulletin on Production of Civil Transport Airports Nationwide in 2025,” as of the end of 2025, there were 270 certificated transport airports within China’s territory (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan regions). Of these, there were 41 transport airports with annual passenger throughput of more than 10 million. That means that for the vast majority of airports, their passenger throughput is actually below the ten-million level.

Behind this is a clear trend: in recent years, more and more “small cities” have been accelerating their pace of airport construction.

For example, Shandong has clearly stated that it plans that by 2035, the province will have 16 transport airports, aiming to achieve “airports in every city,” and it also plans and lays out more than 100 general aviation airports, covering all county-level administrative districts. In Hunan, in 2022, it centrally approved 55 general aviation airport site locations, and it is expected that nearly 80 airports in the province will be available for takeoff and landing in the future. Of course, this is not limited to civil transport airports—it includes a large number of general aviation airports.

Looking only at civil transport airports, Xinjiang currently has the most airports: 28 in 2025, continuing to rank first among all provincial-level regions in the country. Other provinces and regions such as Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Heilongjiang are also relatively high on the list. This distribution may challenge some people’s stereotypes, but it is worth noting that although these regions do not have strong economic development levels, they are vast in territory with complex terrain, and even in some areas, land is wide and people are sparse. In such places, airports may actually be a more cost-effective transportation option, so local motivation to build airports is also stronger.

Industry insiders have pointed out that in plain areas, the cost of high-speed rail per kilometer is about 150 million yuan. In the central and western regions, due to greater construction difficulty and higher costs, building a feeder airport typically only costs several hundred million yuan, and operational and maintenance expenses are also much lower. Compared with high-speed rail, feeder airports have the advantage of “spending less and getting more done, with high efficiency.”

In addition, with the low-altitude economy becoming a new growth direction in recent years, the utilization rate of “small airports” has further improved. Precisely for this reason, more and more “small cities” have also started to plan airport construction and treat it as an important part of improving transportation infrastructure.

According to the national “15th Five-Year Plan” outline, in the next five years, new airports will also be built in Dalian and Xiamen, and major hub airports will have renovation and expansion projects carried out, such as Shenyang, Changchun, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wenzhou, Zhengzhou, and Chengdu Tianfu. It will also advance projects such as relocating and rebuilding feeder airports like Yanji and Yining. This means that some local airports will become “bigger,” while other places will realize their dream of having an airport.

It can be expected that in the near future, flying will be as “anytime and anywhere” as taking high-speed rail, becoming a mainstream choice for daily travel.

Poster design: Zhou Huan