With its expertise and experience in services, Taiwan can help China’s Henan Province develop a service industry that also accentuates the Chinese province’s signature traits, honorary chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Lien Chan (連戰) said yesterday.
Speaking at a forum on economic cooperation with central China, Lien said China’s economy was increasingly shifting its emphasis from manufacturing and exports to domestic consumption and services because of soaring wages, an appreciating currency, labor shortages and higher taxes.
“The service sector will be an important engine powering China’s economic growth in the near future,” he told an audience that included a Henan delegation led by Henan Governor Guo Gengmao (郭庚茂).
Taiwan could be part of the process, Lien said, suggesting, for instance, that credit cooperatives run by farmers’ associations around Taiwan could lend their operating models to Henan to help create a strong agriculture financing system.
He was also optimistic over Henan’s economic prospects, -saying that as businesses in China moved inland, central China, including Henan, would likely become an economic hot spot because of its geographic importance and rich deposits of natural resources.
Meanwhile, Guo said in a thank-you speech that Henan has been reborn in recent years from a poor backwater into a granary that regularly sells 40 million tonnes of food a year to other provinces.
It has also actively promoted economic and cultural exchanges with Taiwan over the past several years. More than 100,000 people traveled between Henan and -Taiwan last year, while two-way trade topped US$500 million.
Currently more than 1,700 Taiwanese companies are operating in Henan, with interests ranging from power generation, electronics and machinery manufacturing to real estate and food processing, according to Guo, and he said more were welcome.
The Henan delegation — comprised of provincial government officials, industrial and business executives and representatives from the cultural sector — arrived in Taipei on Thursday for an eight-day visit to Taiwan.
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