What problems and challenges will be encountered in the future development of urban agglomerations of the Yangtze River Economic Belt? We must have a broad vision to answer this question.There are two development patterns of the Yangtze River Economic Belt: one is the urban agglomerations of the Yangtze River Delta with Shanghai as the core; the other is the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomeration far away from Shanghai and Hong Kong and Macao. The former has vigorously developed an export-oriented economy. The latter one’s development form tends to be internal-oriented economy. Under this development strategy, the major problems and challenges encountered in the development of urban agglomerations of the Yangtze River Economic Belt are as follows:1. As a global node city where multinational enterprises enter China, how can Shanghai better reduce transaction costs in other regions and serve other regions better through the development of modern service industry?2. Can other urban agglomerations far away from the economic center minimize time and space through high-level infrastructure construction, integrate themselves with Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macao, and actively accept the radiation from the economic center?3. The industrial upgrading of urban agglomerations of the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, on the one hand, directly determines the strength of national competitiveness, and on the other hand, is related to the industrial upgrading of urban agglomerations in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomerations.4. Excessive low-end manufacturing in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, especially the heavy chemical industry, will directly threaten the ecological and environmental status of the mother river of the Chinese nation.After economic development enters the new normal, the substantive content of the strategic transformation of open development is to actively build a mechanism embedded in the global innovation chain, participate in the new international division of labor and industrial restructuring, cultivate new comparative advantages, and reshape the new driving force of industrial development.One of the most important challenges for the development of urban agglomerations in the Yangtze River Economic Belt to shift to an open development strategy embedded in the global innovation chain is to build a number of global cities with reasonable structure and complete functions besides Shanghai.The specific form of strategic transformation is to promote the urban agglomeration's export-oriented economy to the open innovation-driven economy, which puts forward new challenges and requirements to the government's economic work.
