The New York Times reports about investments in China’s Far West:
At a conference this week, Chinese officials called the investment in western China a strategic move, designed to raise the living standards of the region’s people and shift growth away from China’s prosperous coastal areas.
The areas include Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, North China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Southwest China’s Tibet autonomous region, and Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.
And not only the government is moving westwards. Also electronics manufacturer Foxconn - moves westwards, to Zhengzhou that is:
Foxconn and senior officials of Zhenzhou and Henan are working on the details of an agreement to build the plant, said a spokesman for the municipal government.
The first phase of the plant will measure 133 (!!) hectares.
The new plant is to employ 300,000 people in the long run. About 100,000 people are to be recruited in the near future, said a recruitment advertisement on the official website of Henan’s Hebi city.
We already showed you the pictures, but now we have moving images! In July 2009, Xi’an opened the brand new 8-lane Xi’an Xianyang International Airport Express Highway (See pictures of the opening ceremony). But half a year after opening, the 20,6 kilometer long road does not seem to be used much - to put it mildly.
We took the highway with a taxi during rush hour in Xi’an. You can see for yourself on the images below. Is this a so-called “Grand Travail Inutil”? We’re inclined to think so, at least for the next couple of years. Our driver said: “I think we’ll never have enough cars to fill this road”, but that might not be true either…
The last week, we had several discussions about China’s stimulus package in infrastructure. Is the Chinese government spending too much money in 8 lines wide highways and 300 km/h bullet trains? Or is all this ambitious construction proof of a great vision, and only a preparation on the developments to come? We are not the only ones discussing this subject; Bill Bonner posted an article with a strong opinion here. Eamon Javers recently wrote a little more subtle, interesting article on the same subject on Politico.com.
This afternoon we arrived in Xi’an. We have seen quite some empty housing, offices, roads etcetera throughout China the last year. But this was quite something, once again… Maybe the stimulus package of the Chinese is indeed mainly focussed on keeping the concrete mills running.
The construction of a nationwide high-speed passenger-rail network will be an engine driving China’s economy, the Ministry of Railways said Wednesday, refuting an earlier report that the system may instead put the brakes on the nation’s economic growth. The 350-kilometer-per-hour railway linking Wuhan and Guangzhou, set to begin operations Saturday, trumpets China’s ambitious 2 trillion-yuan ($293 billion) effort to speed up the country’s railway system.
But some people have raised questions as to whether the mammoth project, aimed at boosting the country’s GDP growth through infrastructure investment, will be too much for travelers to afford, and whether it will be a drag on the economy in the long term.
The story is already some weeks old, but I stumbled upon it today. The vice mayor of Chongqing (a city of >30 million souls in central China) has said his city will have a cargo railway straight to Rotterdam, the Netherlands before 2012. This will greatly boost economic potential of central and western China. More on Shanghai Daily.
In todays article in the Guardian, one of the reasons we see so much new highways in the West (of China) might be revealed: “as much of the demand [related to the economic growth in the first quarter - GWP] comes from stimulus-related infrastructure projects or stimulus-backed subsidy programmes, this raises the issue of sustainability”, so read this:
The Go West Project is a crossover research project between architecture and journalism that studies new metropolises in Central and Western China.
It analyzes urban and social developments in the world's fastest urbanising region. Journalist Michiel Hulshof and architect Daan Roggeveen founded the Go West Project in Shanghai in February 2009.
This website gives an overview of ideas, pictures, articles and opinions related to the cities.
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