1. Limited by the natural environment: Shantou is located on the Chaoshan Plain south of Lianhua Mountain in southeastern Guangdong, with the back of the mountain and the water facing the South China Sea, making Shantou "the corner of the country and the tail of the province". Not only the lack of economic hinterland, but also the inconvenient transportation increases the communication cost between Shantou and the vast inland areas, making it difficult to carry out industrial division of labor and cooperation with other regions and exert the agglomeration effect.

2. Particularity of Chaoshan culture: The unique geographical location of Chaoshan area has created a unique culture here. The relatively closed Chaoshan area has formed a cultural custom linked by family blood relationship in Chaoshan area. Coupled with language, geographical location, transportation and other factors, Chaoshan area inevitably formed a relatively closed and exclusive consciousness, which led to Shantou's relative weakness in attracting foreign talents.

3. Lack of social credit: Limited by land resources, Chaoshan people have a business tradition. With their diligence, hard work and perseverance, they have created business legends of Chaoshan people such as Li Ka-shing and Liu Luanxiong.

Extended data:

Due to the deviation of the guiding ideology of the work of special economic zones and irregular management, some people resort to unscrupulous means to obtain wealth, resulting in frequent illegal acts that violate the laws of the market economy, such as tax evasion and fraud, foreign exchange evasion and fraud, smuggling and smuggling, counterfeiting and selling, debt evasion, deception, lottery gambling and so on. In the subsequent economic review, among the 1 142 Shantou enterprises inspected, 827 were leather bag companies, and the value-added tax was falsely claimed as high as 3.2 billion, with 4.2 billion suspected tax fraud and more than 50 tax-related criminal gangs, which triggered the biggest tax fraud case since the founding of New China.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Shantou Special Economic Zone