Rizhao, literally means sunshine, took its name from the saying that it is the first city to embrace sunshine in the morning. Located in the south of Shandong Peninsula, its land area is 5,359 square kilometers with a sea area of 6,000 square kilometers and a population of 3.06 million. Rizhao has established 8 sister-city relations and about 40 friendly cooperative relations.

Rizhao enjoys 168.5 kilometers of coastline and 64 kilometers of quality beach. It has held over 100 major sports events such as world sailing championship.

Rizhao is a city along the route of the Belt and Road Initiative. With cargo throughput of 438 million tons in 2018, Rizhao Port has become the 6th largest port in China. Rizhao has two large iron and steel companies and 23 projects invested by 13 Fortune Global 500 companies. In 2018, 20 million tons of steel, 950,000 automobiles, 1 million engines, 1.4 million automatic transmissions, 12.2 million tons of petrochemical products, 2.18 million tons of pulp paper were produced and 8.5 million tons of grain and oil were processed here. There is one national-level economic development zone and five provincial-level development zones in Rizhao. The construction of its comprehensive bonded area has been completed and it has passed the acceptance test. The total imports and exports in 2018 hit nearly 90 billion RMB yuan, making it among the top 100 cities of foreign trade in China.