Early in the morning, at the port of Haikou, giant cranes unload containers from Southeast Asia while trucks leave the docks heading to the new industrial parks built around the capital of Hainan. At first glance, it could be just another of the many ports lining the coast of this island south of the world’s great factory. But something exceptional happens here by Chinese standards: many of those goods have entered without paying tariffs. And some will later be able to jump from this tropical province to the huge mainland market, also enjoying tax advantages.
We are in the heart of the Hainan Free Trade Port, the largest in the world by area. It is not a port in the traditional sense. It is an entire island, a territory similar in size to Belgium turned into a huge free zone. It is the most ambitious economic experiment launched by Beijing since those special economic zones that the reformist leader Deng Xiaoping used more than four decades ago to open the first capitalist cracks in communist China.
The Asian superpower is transforming this former pirate island into a platform for trade, finance, technology, and tourism. A kind of Chinese hybrid that aims to look directly at Hong Kong, Singapore, or Dubai. And, in Europe, Spain has been the first country to knock on this promising door.
During the summer of 2025, the governor of Hainan, Liu Xiaoming, was on an official visit to Madrid when the former socialist leader Antonio Miguel Carmona, now a businessman and professor at Peking University, received a call from the Chinese ambassador, Jao Ying. He asked for help to gather, with barely a couple of hours’ notice, representatives from some of the main Ibex companies. Carmona managed to mobilize several businessmen, and that same day a meeting was held with the governor at the Chinese Embassy. At the end, Liu made a proposal: to help bring Spanish investment to Hainan.
Months later, Carmona met again with the governor, this time on the Chinese island and accompanied by lawyer Antonio Álvarez-Ossorio and financier Ángel Fernández-Pola. From those conversations came a plan to create, with the support of provincial authorities, an office that would act as an intermediary between the Spanish business fabric and the new Free Trade Port. Carmona’s team was thus the first in Europe to set up such a structure on the island, aiming to facilitate both the arrival of investments and the marketing of Spanish products.
“The main motivation to set up an office in Hainan was the imbalance of the Spanish trade balance with respect to China,” Carmona explains to EL MUNDO. “From there, and at the request of the governor of Hainan, they proposed setting up a commercial office. Taking advantage of the free trade project, we need to introduce Spanish investors and products that help reduce the trade deficit and try to compensate for that imbalance.”
Since its launch, according to the data Carmona manages, the office has signed agreements with 32 Spanish companies, some interested in investing directly in Hainan and others in using the island as a platform to market their products in China. “With nearly 63% of these companies, we have had great success,” says the businessman. “What they are demanding most are tourism companies.” A sector that fits precisely with one of the pillars on which Beijing wants to build the new economic model of the territory: a gateway for goods and foreign capital, but also the great vacation and consumption destination of southern China and other Asian neighbors.
The Spanish entry into the island has also involved Joan Gaspart, former president of FC Barcelona, named by local authorities as “global ambassador of Hainan.” And there is a third man, much more political, who appears repeatedly linked to this place: José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The former Prime Minister has been traveling to Hainan for years, participating in the Boao Forum, the great political and economic event known as the Asian Davos, and meeting with senior officials of the province’s Communist Party.
Hainan has thus become one of those discreet settings where some of the most important political and business contacts between Spain and China have been woven. The qualitative leap in relations came in December 2025, when the island began operating under a customs regime separate from the rest of China. In the first five and a half months of the new system, imports under zero tariff approached 2.65 billion yuan – about 318 million euros – a year-on-year increase of 120%.
But to better understand the dimension of the new Chinese experiment, one must leave Haikou and travel about 300 kilometers south to Sanya, the tourist capital. Paradise beaches, luxury resorts, golf courses, and marinas full of yachts. Here Beijing is not only looking to attract foreign capital. It also aims to prevent its own from leaving.
“We have tropical marine resources and a favorable climate all year round,” highlights Shi Lei, director of the International Exchange Department of the Sanya Tourism Development Office. “The strategy is to ensure that those who come looking for sun and sea find enough reasons to stay longer and, above all, spend more,” he adds.
In the Haitang Bay area stands one of the great temples of this strategy: the Sanya International Duty Free Shopping Complex. A gigantic complex that brings together more than a thousand international brands and a duty-free offer. The corridors are lined with showcases of jewelry, watches, cosmetics, and international brands while groups of Chinese tourists move forward loaded with bags.
Since its opening, Lei explains, more than 70 million visitors have toured a space that mixes shops, restaurants, entertainment, and cultural activities. “Since the new duty-free shopping policy began until the end of April 2026, nearly three million visitors bought 17.45 million items. Spending grew by 22.6% compared to the same period last year,” he assures.
Local officials insist that the big bet now is to attract corporate headquarters, funds, insurers, technology companies, and businesses linked to international trade. For many companies, there is a reduced corporate tax of 15%. With this, China seeks to demonstrate that despite the trade war with the United States, technological restrictions, and the doubts its economy has generated among foreign investors, it can still open new windows to international capital.
Hainan now serves Beijing as a showcase of openness when foreign investment has been showing signs of weakness for years. But it also functions as a controlled experiment: China can test here measures that would be much riskier if applied suddenly throughout the country. A communist island playing at being a free port. A Chinese territory separated from the rest of the provinces by a customs border. A gigantic laboratory where Beijing tries to attract foreign capital, recover consumption that escaped abroad, and test how far it can open its economy without losing control over it.
Four decades ago, that experiment was called Shenzhen and was little more than a border city opposite Hong Kong. It ended up becoming one of the great technological engines of the planet. Now China is again testing a large-scale opening, this time on a tropical island of 35,000 square kilometers. And while Beijing tries to repeat part of that economic miracle, Spain has already made a move not to be left out.