Abstract: Provincial sub-central cities undertake some transferred functions from provincial capital cities, promoting the flow of factors to surrounding areas, and thus forming interdependent positive interactions with neighboring areas through division of labor and collaboration. Local universities serve as the source of knowledge, technology, and talent in their regions, providing crucial support for the development of new productive forces in provincial sub-central cities, and boosting regional economic development and industrial transformation and upgrading. The coordinated development of local universities and new productive forces in provincial sub-central cities exhibits logical coupling at the starting point, route, and endpoint. "Five pairs" of relationships--the symbiotic relationship between urban development and university development, the integration relationship between industrial development and educational development, the dependent relationship between human development and productive forces development, the matching relationship between transformation needs and technological empowerment, and the accompanying relationship between inheritance and innovation, should be properly handled.

Key words: New-quality Productive Force, local universities, sub-provincial city, coupling logic