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

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area will soon see a new airport. On March 25, the Guangzhou new airport project broke ground in Gaoming District, Foshan. As an aviation hub serving the west bank of the Pearl River and radiating to the western Guangdong region, it has officially moved from blueprint to construction stage.

According to the plan, this phase of the airport’s project has a total investment of CNY 41.808 billion. It will build 2 long-distance parallel runways, a terminal building with a floor area of about 260,000 square meters, 94 aircraft stands, and the corresponding supporting facilities. The airfield area is planned to meet the 4E standard. It is expected to meet operational demands of 30 million passenger trips per year, 5 million tons of cargo and mail throughput, and 260,000 aircraft takeoffs and landings. The airport is planned to be completed and begin operations during the “14th Five-Year Plan” period (referred to as the “15th-Five” in the text).

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

New airport design inspiration from Guangdong opera headwear: the top scholar’s Guan (crown) — Foshan Gaoming District Government website photo

Boosting coordinated regional development in the Greater Bay Area

According to the plan, the Guangzhou new airport is a domestic civil hub airport. It is an important component of Guangzhou’s international aviation hub, and one of the Greater Bay Area aviation hubs. At the same time, it also shoulders the role of being a comprehensive transportation hub in the western part of the Greater Bay Area.

It is worth noting that although it is called the “Guangzhou new airport,” its site is actually located in Gaoming District, Foshan—right at the geographic center of Foshan, Zhaoqing, Jiangmen, and Yunfu. It will directly serve Guangzhou-Foshan-Zhaoqing-Jiangmen (GFT) and the surrounding population of over 20 million. In the future, it will mainly meet the aviation demand of the west bank city cluster of the Pearl River.

For a long time, the airport clusters in the Greater Bay Area have shown a clear 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, to a certain extent, change this situation, and provide a high-level opening-up platform for the development of the west bank city cluster, while also helping drive coordinated regional development across the entire Greater Bay Area.

There are earlier examples of similar site selections. For example, the Jieyang Chaoshan International Airport, located in the eastern Guangdong region and put into operation in 2011, sits at the geographic center of the three cities of Shantou, Chaozhou, and Jieyang, and mainly serves the entire Chaoshan region.

In fact, as a mega engineering project and a flow gateway, the planning and construction of large airports has never been limited to the consideration of a single city or one jurisdiction. Driving regional development with the airport’s leverage effect is an important motivation behind many cities’ decision to build a second airport.

For example, the Beijing Daxing Airport is located at the border area between Daxing District and Langfang, Hebei, which can effectively serve coordinated development in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei. Chengdu Tianfu Airport is laid out in Jianyang, echoing the construction of the Chengdu-Chongqing Twin-City Economic Circle and the development of the Eastern New Area. The original construction of Pudong Airport also actually matched the needs of Pudong’s development and opening-up. Shanghai’s third airport is sited in Nantong, which likewise reflects the direction of integrated development in the Yangtze River Delta.

Therefore, the construction of the Guangzhou new airport and its special site selection are not only an upgrade to the Greater Bay Area’s aviation hub, but will also bring new benefits to optimizing the development layout of the entire Greater Bay Area.

(Drone photo) of the site of the Guangzhou new airport taken on March 24. Xinhua News Agency photo

A second-airport city may gain new members again

As global industries upgrade, the status of aviation hubs is increasingly becoming an important dimension for measuring a region’s development level and degree of openness.

At present, China has formed four world-class airport clusters—Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and the Chengdu-Chongqing region. In 2025, these four airport clusters completed passenger throughput of 158.601 million passenger trips, 306.441 million passenger trips, 168.146 million passenger trips, and 151.480 million passenger trips, respectively.

Among them, the Yangtze River Delta airport cluster leads the other three clusters with an absolute advantage in throughput of over 300 million passenger trips, and it is also the most densely concentrated city cluster with large civil transport airports of level 4E or above—at least including nine airports such as Shanghai Pudong, Shanghai Hongqiao, Nanjing Lukou, Hangzhou Xiaoshan, Hefei Xinqiao, Wenzhou Longwan, Ningbo Lishe, Wuxi Shuofang, and Jiaxing Nanhu.

The Greater Bay Area airport cluster also has at least seven airports, including Guangzhou Baiyun, Guangzhou new airport, Shenzhen Bao’an, Zhuhai Jinwan, Hong Kong International, Macao International, and Jieyang Chaoshan International Airport. The Chengdu-Chongqing region is currently 3 airports: Chengdu Shuangliu, Chengdu Tianfu, and Chongqing Jiangbei Airport.

However, “the construction of a new Nantong airport” and “advancing preliminary work for a new Chongqing airport” have already been written into the national “15th-Five” plan outline. By then, the Yangtze River Delta and Chengdu-Chongqing regions will each add another large civil transport airport, and Shanghai will also become the country’s first aviation hub with three airports.

At present, second-airport cities still only total four: Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, and Guangzhou (under construction). These are also the four cities with the highest passenger throughput among aviation passengers. In 2025, Shanghai and Beijing’s passenger throughput at their dual-airport setup broke 130 million and 120 million passenger trips, respectively. Chengdu’s dual-airport setup exceeded 90 million passenger trips, while Guangzhou—thanks to Baiyun Airport—first surpassed 80 million passenger trips.

It should be especially noted that last year, Nanjing announced that it will, in due course, launch civil functions for the Ma’anshan Airport. This means that second-airport cities could add new members again. And counting the future new Chongqing airport, the number of dual-airport cities nationwide will rise to six.

(Drone photo) of the Guangzhou new airport construction start on March 25. Xinhua News Agency photo

More and more “small cities” are accelerating airport construction

The Civil Aviation Administration of China’s 《2025 National Civil Transport Airport Production Statistics Bulletin》 shows that as of the end of 2025, there are 270 licensed transport airports in China (excluding the Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan regions). Of these, 41 transport airports have annual passenger throughput of more than 10 million passenger trips. That means that for the vast majority of airports, their passenger throughput is actually below the ten-million level.

Behind this is an obvious trend: in recent years, more and more “small cities” have been stepping up their airport construction efforts.

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

Looking only at civil transport airports, the province with the most airports is Xinjiang: in 2025 it reached 28 airports, remaining the top in the country among all provinces and autonomous regions. Other regions such as Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Heilongjiang are also relatively high up. This distribution may challenge some people’s stereotypes, but it is also important to see that although these regions do not have the advantage of higher economic development levels, they are vast in area, have complex terrain, and even some areas are sparsely populated. For them, airports are actually a more cost-effective mode of transportation—so local areas have even stronger motivation to build airports.

Industry insiders have pointed out that in plain areas, high-speed rail costs about CNY 150 million per kilometer. In the central and western regions, due to higher construction difficulty and cost, building a branch-line airport usually only requires a few hundred million yuan, and operating and maintenance costs are much lower. Compared with high-speed rail, it therefore has the advantage of “spending less money, getting more done, and achieving higher efficiency.”

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

According to the national “15th-Five” plan outline, in the next five years, new airports in Dalian and Xiamen will also be built, and hub airport upgrade and expansion projects will be carried out for airports such as Shenyang, Changchun, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wenzhou, Zhengzhou, and Chengdu Tianfu. Branch-airport projects will be advanced, such as the relocation and construction of airports in Yanji and Yining. This means that some places’ airports will become “bigger,” while other places will fulfill their airport dreams.

It can be expected that in the not-too-distant future, flying will be as “anytime, anywhere” as taking high-speed rail, becoming a daily travel choice for the public.

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