Designated as the sole tea industrial cluster among 40 Chinese competitive and featured industrial clusters for 2026

Fuzhou’s jasmine tea industry has seen a historical milestone. We learned on May 23 from the Fuzhou Municipal Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs that China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs recently announced the 2026 list of projects on the integration of agriculture and industry. The jasmine tea industrial cluster in Fuzhou, Fujian Province made the list, and is the only tea industrial cluster among 40 competitive and featured industrial clusters in China.

How to define China national competitive and featured industrial clusters? China began to launch a campaign for building national competitive and featured industrial clusters in 2020. The campaign is intended to prioritize competitive and featured products, and give prominence to key counties and cities, development across the industrial chain and improvement across the value chain to foster a number of competitive and featured industrial clusters that are rationally structured and boast complete chains.

“The national competitive and featured industrial cluster is significant in that it can promote coordination and upgrading across the industrial chain, and help enterprises to better establish bonds with farmer households and guide farmer households. According to a person in charge of the Fuzhou Municipal Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, given that Fuzhou jasmine tea are included in both globally important agricultural heritage systems (GIAHS) and the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, cluster-based development will be helpful to pooling resources to shore up weak links in planting, processing, circulation and brand building, and promote in-depth integration of tea culture, tea industry and tea-related technology so that the traditional industry can secure both output growth and marked improvements in quality.

Fuzhou, known as the place where jasmine tea originated, has seen a complete industrial chain ranging from planting, intensive and deep processing to brand building and culture-tourism integration. Fuzhou is currently home to as many as 120 jasmine tea factories above designated size. The production value across the industrial chain in 2025 amounted to RMB 11.8 bln, accounting for more than 70% of Fujian province’s total jasmine tea production value. The industry is seeing a robust momentum of development.