For the 200 or so business people who jammed a hotel ballroom for a conference here, it was a typically Chinese affair. Dry speeches, the swapping of name cards and a marathon banquet, with dutiful toasts to the shiny future of this southern Chinese city.
But that Guangzhou felt compelled to promote itself to the foreign companies it invited to the gathering this week attests to the changing winds in China. Guangzhou and its surrounding province, Guangdong, are reaching the end of a two-decade run as the undisputed economic gateway to China, the only relatively open place in a closed country.
With China preparing to enter the WTO and barriers to foreign companies falling, other Chinese cities, Shanghai chief among them, are vying for the investments that would once have been Guangdong's alone.
"Other people are learning from us," said Chen Mingde, director general of the city's trade and economic relations commission. "When you open up, you create new rivals. But Guangzhou will not be left behind."
Chen and other officials talked up attractions like a new airport and an upgraded port, and they pledged to clean up Guangzhou's blighted environment. They pointed out that the city has no fewer than seven technology parks, with names like Photon Valley, Science Town and International Bio-island.
But Guangzhou is meeting setbacks in precisely the fast-growing industries those names denote. For example, one of China's first semiconductor plants, a US$1.63 billion project backed by Winston Wong, the scion of one of Taiwan's richest families, is being built in a technology park in Shanghai, not in Guangzhou.
When China began opening its economy in 1979, investors from Hong Kong and Taiwan tended to flock to Guangdong, which besides proximity to Hong Kong also had the advantage of a provincial government proudly independent from the Communists in Beijing.
Guangdong and neighboring Fujian province together soaked up 70 percent of all Taiwanese investment in China in the 1980s. But in the first nine months of 2000, almost half went to Shanghai. "Guangdong province still hosts the highest amount of Taiwanese investments," Jerry Lu of CLSA Emerging Markets wrote in a report. "But it is only a matter of time before this leadership vanishes."
Foreign companies are drawn to Shanghai by its many universities, which produce a better-educated work force. They want to be close to the anointed financial capital of China. And, China experts say that because both the president of China, Jiang Zemin (
Guangdong's defenders say those connections will count for less after China joins the WTO. What will matter, they say, is that officials here have long experience of dealing with foreigners.
"In some parts of China, you worry when there is a change in officials that you may no longer be welcome," said Eva Cheng, the chairman of Amway China. "But here, being open to foreigners is not a recent attitude."
Cheng knows firsthand the vagaries of China's bureaucracy. In early 1998, Beijing banned door-to-door sales of products because of widespread abuses by unscrupulous operators. The ruling threatened to put her company, the local unit of Amway, the American door-to-door sales giant, out of business.
RSS