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 了解中国：New Boomtowns Change Path of China's Growth （转贴） |
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安普若
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加入时间: 2004/02/21
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作者：安普若 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
New Boomtowns Change Path of China's Growth
July 28, 2004
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Correction Appended
DONGGUAN, China - The cranes peek out from behind
skyscrapers in every direction, wheeling and nodding in a
slow-motion ballet as crews work around the clock to fill
in an already crowded skyline.
Newly planted palms line the sides of broad, newly traced
avenues where the traffic lights have not been turned on
yet.
Dongguan has exploded from a mere town to a city of seven
million in a little over 20 years. But the city officials
are not content with a 23 percent annual economic growth
rate. They are putting the finishing touches on a vast,
entirely new annex city that they hope will draw 300,000
engineers and researchers, the vanguard of a new China.
"We are the first in China to pursue this kind of vision,''
said Wang Jianya, deputy director of the development,
called Songshan Lake Pioneer Park. "We're not trying to be
the biggest, only the best.''
Dongguan is one of a score of Chinese megacities whose
extraordinary growth reflects China's boom and its
challenge. The country's rapid urbanization is helping to
lift hundreds of millions of rural Chinese out of poverty.
But at the same time, these new second-tier cities are
locked in a ferocious competition, spawning ambitious
development plans that escape the control of the central
government in Beijing.
Economists like Tang Wing-shing, a specialist in urban
development at Baptist University in Hong Kong, worry about
the consequences: waste of resources, loss of arable land,
fiscal crises, corruption and pollution.
"Every city wants to develop into a world city, and every
one wants to have an international airport, six-lane
highways and export zones, rather than integrated growth,''
Professor Tang said. "This is what we are observing in
China today. All of the cities have been turned into vast
construction zones, and the government has not contemplated
the consequences of this yet.''
China has 166 cities with populations over one million,
compared with nine in the United States. China's urban
population is growing at 2.5 percent a year, among the
fastest rate in the world, according to the United Nations
Population Division. That compares with 0.8 percent in
India, another large, fast-developing nation.
In fact, Beijing has found its powers to slow runaway
growth to be surprisingly limited, in part because
provinces and cities resist efforts to rein in their
investments.
Although the central government allots money to pet
development projects, provinces raise money for their own
projects by selling rights to develop real estate. In many
cases, local officials are judged in part by economic
measures - how many jobs they create, how many big
buildings spring up.
That means that many provincial officials are trying the
same formula: manufacturing and export zones, research
parks and self-styled Silicon Valleys like Pioneer Park in
Dongguan.
Dongguan's officials, in fact, have even bigger plans.
"In the future our goal is 10 million people," Dongguan's
deputy mayor, Zhang Shenguang, said almost nonchalantly.
"Beyond that, we may have problems with electricity and
water."
But the model Dongguan is pursuing has not always worked.
Yehua Dennis Wei of the University of Wisconsin cited the
case of Wenzhou, a southeastern city of 1.4 million. Like
many second-tier cities, Wenzhou is straining to beat the
competition by creating research and development and
manufacturing zones.
Because Wenzhou is not that close to the major
concentrations of business in China's booming Yangtze
Delta, businesses are leaving for bigger cities like
Shanghai. Scrambling to woo more business, local
governments like Wenzhou keep giving away more land and
building even bigger industrial parks.
The unchecked development means there is little ability to
consider China's needs as a whole, or to prevent
duplication and waste.
Some cities, though, are trying a different approach to
growth. One landlocked city that seems to be thriving,
Wuhan, which sits astride the broad Yangtze River 400 miles
west of Shanghai, has struck on a formula of its own.
To be sure, Wuhan, a city of 4.5 million official residents
and millions of migrants, has its own research and
manufacturing parks, one of which is a sprawling place
called Laser Valley, which contains fiber-optic,
electronics and pharmaceutical companies arrayed one after
another on a huge grid.
But the main thrust of Wuhan's strategy has been to rely on
an old-line industry, automobile manufacturing, whose
history here predates China's economic liberalization. By
selling off assets to foreign and domestic investors and
encouraging foreign automakers like Nissan, Honda and
Citro雗 to enter into joint ventures with Chinese
companies, Wuhan is positioning itself for re-emergence as
the Detroit of China.
The city has even managed to sell its central location as a
boon for efficient distribution at a time when domestic car
sales here are booming.
Wuhan is hardly more of a household name overseas than
Dongguan, but its recent growth has outpaced Dongguan's. In
an interview, the city's mayor, Li Xiansheng, proudly
reeled off the latest statistics: 13.8 percent growth for
the first half of the year, along with 26 percent tax
revenue growth and 50 percent fixed capital growth during
the same period.
"In the past, I regret to say, we were left behind by a lot
of eastern cities, but Wuhan is determined to play its
role,'' Mr. Li said. "If you draw a circle of 2,000
kilometers in diameter with Wuhan at its center, 80 percent
of Chinese cities will be fall inside it. We are blessed to
be the economic hub of central China.'' The radius he
mentioned is a little more than 1,200 miles.
Wuhan is dotted with technical colleges and trade schools,
rather than the proliferation of research parks and new
universities seen in so many other cities, winning it
praise from manufacturers.
"Wuhan has a long history of auto production, and there are
excellent human resources here for that reason,'' said Liu
Yuhe, deputy general manager of the Dongfeng Honda
Autowork, a Chinese partner with several foreign car
makers.
There is another reason for Wuhan's success: its higher
education is among the best in China's provinces. The
schools have faculties of auto production and auto
engineering, resources unmatched anywhere else in the
nation.
Which approach to economic growth will prove more
successful in the long run - export-dominated technology
zones or the more deliberate rise up the ladder of
industrial development - is an open question.
For all its cachet, Dongguan has dozens of competitors
trying variations of the same thing, and many of those
experiments seem destined to end unhappily. Wuhan, on the
other hand, has found a niche but could conceivably see its
star fade like those of America's steel towns.
"Overplanning a city will kill it, but so will trying to
make it a steel town, a car town or an electronics town,''
said Richard Florida, an expert in urban development at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "What you have to
do is allow people to use their own energies and allow
markets to create the new city in their own hurly-burly
way, and that's usually a messy, unpredictable process.''
An article on Wednesday about China's rapid urbanization
misstated a distance translation in explaining a comment by
Li Xiansheng, the mayor of one thriving city, who said, "If
you draw a circle of 2,000 kilometers in diameter with
Wuhan at its center, 80 percent of Chinese cities will fall
inside it." The conversion is indeed to 1,200 miles, but
that is a diameter, not a radius.
作者：安普若 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 了解中国：New Boomtowns Change Path of China's Growth （转贴） -- 安普若 - (7896 Byte) 2004-7-31 周六, 03:14 (1338 reads)
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