City Development and Internationalization in China by Qianyi Wang & Kee Cheok Cheong & Ran Li

Author:Qianyi Wang & Kee Cheok Cheong & Ran Li
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811505447
Publisher: Springer Singapore

This positive outlook must be tempered by several major challenges. Like many heavily industrialized cities in China, Quanzhou experiences pollution by heavy metals. These heavy metals produced by Quanzhou’s industries are carried to the ocean by the Jinjiang River and rainwater runoff, or seep into the ground water. Metal contamination in the Quanzhou coastal region is severe, causing serious threats to the environment (Yu, Yuan, Zhao, Hu, & Tu, 2008; Zhao et al., 2012). Yet, secondary industry is still the foundation of local prosperity. In particular, the petroleum industry is driving the prosperity of the coastal region. If unaddressed, the heavy metal pollution would damage also the city’s marine economy. The challenge for the city, like many other cities in China, is to move away from heavily polluting industries to those that help, if not ensure, environmental sustainability. In this sense, moving to high-tech industry is not just a matter of competitiveness; it is a matter of survival.

Further, at the regional level, it is important to remember that Quanzhou is not the only game in town in Fujian. Other rapidly developing centers like Xiamen and Fuzhou are competing for the provincial government’s attention and funds as well as investors from Taiwan. Such competition, while helping to bolster institutional capabilities and sharpening competitiveness, can nevertheless be destructive in that energies are devoted to competing against each other instead of attracting foreign investment. The coordinating role of the central government is vital here. Yet, Quanzhou retains some unique advantages. The Maritime Silk Route, while beneficial to the entire South China, will have a particularly large impact on Quanzhou. How much of this impact can be captured beneficially by Quanzhou will depend not only on the capacity of the city administration but also of the resourcefulness of the city’s private sector.

The above narrative allows us to finally address an important objective enunciated early in this chapter, that is, to re-emphasize the large role played by the city’s history. Recent history has had a hand in the city’s spatial planning and growth. However, the lack of planning in the 1990s has created problems that more rational plans dating from 1995 need to overcome, rendering the cost of taking advantage of agglomeration economies higher. This unfortunate legacy has also created obstacles for the future. After a prolonged period of economic obscurity, economic liberalization fanned rapid but unregulated industrial development that polluted the environment and left the city with an industrial structure that has been slow to upgrade. These challenges are balanced by a positive development that can set the course for the city’s long-term development. The selection of Quanzhou as a pivot city for China’s Maritime Silk Route owes more to its history of openness than to its recent economic rise, the latter matched by other coastal cities.

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