Beijing, the capital

Beijing is where decisions are made in China. It is home to the ministries, the central bank and the regulators, and it hosts more head offices of the world's largest companies than any other city. At the same time, Beijing is the centre of gravity of China's AI sector. For Belgians the city has an extra layer: a Flemish Jesuit who taught the emperor and a Belgian railway running south. The delegation of the China Business Mission 2026 ended its trip in Beijing on 17 October, with a visit to the Forbidden City on the programme.

An economy the size of a country

Beijing had 21.8 million residents at the end of 2025, almost twice the population of Belgium. That year its economy passed the 5 trillion yuan mark for the first time and grew by 5.4%, according to the city's statistical communiqué. Per resident that is about 239,000 yuan or 33,000 dollars. Close to 6% of GDP goes to research and development, and at the end of 2025 the city counted 116 unicorns, start-ups valued at more than a billion dollars.

Beijing is first and foremost a services city. Industry, construction and agriculture together account for only 14% of the economy. IT and software alone make up almost a quarter, the financial sector a sixth.

This year shows where the growth is. In the first three quarters of 2026 GDP grew by 5.2% to 4,047 billion yuan, the Beijing Daily reported. The electronics industry grew by 40.9%, server output by 36.8% and industrial robot output by 47.6%. Car production, by contrast, fell by 16.3% and retail sales declined slightly. In the capital too, growth runs on technology far more than on consumers.

The city of decision-makers

What sets Beijing apart from Shanghai or Hefei is its proximity to power. Financial Street is home to China's central bank, the financial regulators and the head offices of the big state banks. In 2026 the city hosted 42 Fortune Global 500 head offices, more than Tokyo (26) and New York (15) combined, and Beijing has led the ranking for fourteen years, according to the city government. The list includes giants such as State Grid, oil group CNPC, ICBC and China Mobile, as well as JD.com and Xiaomi.

For a European company this has a practical side. Even if you produce in Shanghai, Hangzhou or Hefei, sooner or later you will end up in Beijing for standards, licences, certification and large tenders. How the political side of the city works is explained in our article on Beijing as a political centre.

Zhongguancun and the AI capital

Beijing's tech side lies in the north-west, in Zhongguancun, between Peking University and Tsinghua. In 1988 it became China's first high-tech zone. Lenovo, Baidu, Xiaomi and ByteDance all started in Beijing, most of them in and around this district. That concentration of talent makes the city the country's AI capital. By April 2026, 225 large AI models from Beijing had completed the mandatory registration with China's internet regulator, about a third of the national total.

In the south-east lies its counterpart, the E-Town economic and technological development zone. Since 2025 it has organised a half marathon for humanoid robots, and the difference between two editions shows how fast the technology is moving.

On 19 April 2026 a robot from smartphone maker Honor ran the 21 kilometres autonomously in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, faster than the human world record. A year earlier the winner had needed 2 hours and 40 minutes. More than 300 robots from over a hundred teams took part, PBS reported.

A Flemish Jesuit at court

Nowhere in China does the Belgian story go back as far as in Beijing. Ferdinand Verbiest, born in Pittem in 1623, arrived in China as a Jesuit in 1658 and was called to Beijing in 1660. In 1669 he won a public astronomy test ordered by the Kangxi Emperor and was then made director of the observatory. He designed six large bronze instruments that still stand on the roof of the ancient observatory near Jianguomen. Kangxi took lessons from him in geometry and music and, after his death in 1688, gave him a posthumous title, the only Westerner ever to receive one.

Two centuries later came the next Belgian episode. Li Hongzhang, the statesman from Hefei, also visited Belgium on his European journey of 1896, and a Belgian consortium was then granted the concession for the Peking-Hankou railway. Engineer Jean Jadot led the works. The 1,214-kilometre line opened on 14 November 1905, and China bought it back in 1909, according to Wikipedia. The story of Li Hongzhang is told in our article on Hefei. Belgium and China established diplomatic relations on 25 October 1971; in October 2026 that was 55 years ago.

Palace, hutongs and Peking duck

The Forbidden City was built between 1406 and 1420 on the orders of the Ming Yongle Emperor, who moved his capital from Nanjing to Beijing. Until the last emperor, Puyi, abdicated in 1912, 24 emperors ruled from here. The complex covers 72 hectares with about 980 buildings, has been a museum since 1925 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987. More on the palace in our article on the Forbidden City.

Around the palace, old Beijing lives on in the hutongs, narrow lanes with courtyard houses, such as those around the Shichahai lakes. Peking opera, incidentally, has a link with Hefei: it grew out of the style of four opera troupes from Anhui that came to the capital in 1790 for the Qianlong Emperor's eightieth birthday. Anyone eating in Beijing orders Peking duck, rolled in a paper-thin pancake with sweet bean sauce, spring onion and cucumber.

Where the rules are written

Anyone doing business in China mainly sees the factories in the east and the south. Beijing shows the place where the rules for those factories are written. Standards, licences, rules for data and AI, and the big state-owned companies as customers all sit close together here. For a European company Beijing is therefore rarely the first sales market. It is, however, the city where you learn how decisions are made, and building that network early saves time in every other Chinese city. What such an approach looks like is described on our page about doing business in China.