Guangdong province forged ahead with its "high-quality development project for Guangdong counties, towns and villages" program in 2024, fostering the coordinated development of its urban and rural areas, said Wang Weizhong, governor of the province, when delivering the government work report on Wednesday.

The program, launched in 2022, focuses on the 122 counties, county-level cities and districts, 1,609 townships and streets as well as 26,500 administrative villages and communities in Guangdong.

It includes various supportive measures and projects, with the aim of establishing a new pattern of integrated urban-rural development.

According to the provincial government work report, the income ratio between urban and rural residents in Guangdong narrowed to 2.31 to 1 in 2024.

A total of 17 districts, one county, one county-level city and 124 townships were recognized as among the top 100 districts, top 100 counties, and top 1,000 townships in the country.

Of them, Chang'an township in Dongguan became the province's third township whose GDP has surpassed 100 billion yuan ($13.64 billion), following Shishan and Beijiao townships in Foshan.

To boost rural vitalization, Guangdong reclaimed and upgraded high-standard farmland of some 74,667 hectares in 2024. The farmland area has witnessed net growth for four consecutive years, the report said.

Additionally, both the province's output of aquatic larvae and its total amount of waters used for deep-sea cage aquaculture rank first nationwide.

The National Marine Comprehensive Testing Field (Zhuhai), jointly built by the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Guangdong provincial government, started the first batch of tests in October.

This year, the province will continue to implement the high-quality development project for Guangdong counties, towns and villages and endeavor to achieve preliminary results, which was the target set in 2022, Wang said.

He emphasized that Guangdong must adhere to the integrated development of industries, counties and people. The authorities will push forward the new urbanization pilot program in several counties and improve the urbanization level in western Guangdong.

Meanwhile, he urged rural areas to explore paths for collective economic diversification, support village collectives to participate in projects with stable earnings and prevent large-scale rural population from becoming poor again.

"We must give priority to agriculture and rural areas and do everything to broaden farmers' income channels, making agriculture a promising industry, villages more attractive, and farmers hopeful for the future," he said.

The province will also boost the marine economy and bay area economy in 2025 by developing more marine ranching demonstration projects; enhancing the marine engineering equipment manufacturing industry and marine shipbuilding industry; and stepping up marine ecology protection and restoration.

"We will transform the advantages of ocean resources into economic momentum and growth vitality to build a 'new Guangdong' at sea," Wang said.