The success of the “Go West” strategy to boost the poorer regions in the west of China is obvious as soon as you get off the plane in Chengdu’s swanky new airport.
Driving around this part of Sichuan province, it is striking how quickly the repair work following the earthquake in May 2008 was completed. There is little evidence of any damage.
But it is in the capital, that you can really see how China has changed over the past 20 years or so. Chengdu is not as wealthy as Shanghai or Beijing, but it is coming on fast and the city’s look has been transformed.
Singapore property developer CapitaLand unveiled Raffles City Chengdu in September, an integrated development in the city’s central business district (CBD).
Hong Kong entertainment czar Allan Zeman, who is known for developing that city’s upmarket nightlife hub, Lan Kwai Fong, is bringing the concept to Chengdu and has built an entertainment district 18 times bigger than its Hong Kong equivalent.
Among the landmarks downtown is the Sliced Porosity Block by the architect Steven Holl. It is a sophisticated complex of three pavilions with water features.
At the city’s boundary, Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill are building a 1.3sq km city called Chengdu Tianfu District Great City.
Smith is a tall-building specialist, so the self-sustaining satellite city will feature a few skyscrapers when it is completed in about eight years’ time.
Texas Instruments, a maker of analogue circuit components and semiconductors, signed an agreement in October with the Chengdu Tianfu Software Park to establish research and development and sales centres in the park.
This fits nicely with the city’s stated ambition of becoming the Silicon Valley of China. Nearly half of the iPads sold worldwide are assembled in Chengdu, while computer giant Intel makes up to half of its chips in the city.
Ge Honglin, the mayor of Chengdu, recently unveiled a list of 17 new projects with a total value of 18.14 billion yuan (€2.2 billion). Four of the projects involved companies on the Fortune Global 500 list of the world’s largest companies by revenue, four were in modern manufacturing and eight were in modern agriculture.
Part of the plan to bring the west up to speed involves learning from the richer hubs on the eastern coast.
Advanced manufacturing and services companies from Shanghai are spending 12.4 billion yuan (€1.5 billion) in 17 projects in bio-pharmaceutical, information technology, auto, logistics and organic agriculture in the city.
“Chengdu is not targeting interior cities as competitors,” said Mr Ge.
“We are looking at coastal cities in order to help the people in Chengdu enjoy a better living standard and social benefits.”
Chengdu is working hard to attract more projects in advanced modern manufacturing. So far, 229 of the Fortune 500 global companies have plans to invest in the city, up from 42 in 2002. The city will host the 2013 Fortune Global Forum, which has been held in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing.
The city offers relatively low wages compared to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and Chengdu boasts a low
5 per cent turnover rate for labour, unlike Shanghai and Beijing, where high turnover rates are a problem.
The city has witnessed a major crackdown on corruption recently too.
Former Chengdu mayor and Sichuan deputy Communist Party secretary Li Chuncheng was arrested and is accused of offering bribes for promotion, selling official positions to incompetent candidates and making his wife head of Chengdu’s Red Cross after it received huge sums following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
Mr Li is the first ministerial-level official to be investigated following the Communist Party’s national congress in November, which appointed Xi Jinping as leader.
Nicknamed the “city demolisher”, Mr Li was also linked to land grabs.
One of Mr Li’s pet projects was the urban regeneration of northern Chengdu, where military factories owned by the government were struggling and he was hoping to renovate the area.
His family was allegedly linked to one of the companies that was bidding to buy the land during an auction in 2009.
