On 30 August 2019, as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese leadership officially opened a pilot free trade zone in Heilongjiang Province. The main goals of this large-scale economic project were to liberalise and simplify trade processes, increase the openness of its procedures, attract investment, and sustainably develop industrial cooperation with neighbouring Russia and other countries. In 2023, just four years after its launch, the pilot FTZ already has about 25,000 new enterprises and foreign trade volume has reached about 124 billion yuan (US$17.4 billion).

How this new Chinese economic miracle works is the subject of a joint project by TV BRICS and Heilongjiang Broadcasting (Heilongjiang Omnimedia Centre).