TOKYO--Japan is poised to lead foreign investment in the next
important phase
of China's development, centered on Chongqing, an inland city whose name
most outsiders have never heard.
The "Japan factor," hardly mentioned during China's 50th birthday
party and media binge recently, is on the verge of getting the attention it
deserves.
The focus has been on United States-China relations because China's
President Jiang Zemin is convinced that good relations with Washington are
crucial to China's development.
Scholars like Harvard's Ezra Vogel (remember his book "Japan As No.
1" in 1979?)
are turning the focus of their research to the U.S.-Japan-China triangle.
It is not so much of a security emphasis as a matrix for development of
the Asian region, with China as the centerpiece.
Japanese investment activity in China is crucial. You can talk all day
about American and European investment in Beijing and Shanghai. The fact
is that if Japanese investment in those two cities and elsewhere in
China--there are more than 1,500 Japanese firms at work in the crispy-clean
Northeast China city of Dalian alone--were suddenly yanked out, the
country's development boom would go bust.
Talk about Chinese spies and missiles, as well as Taiwan, dominates
the China news in the west.
To give some perspective, the economic story of the 1980s was the
opening and take-off of Shenzhen next door to Hong Kong. This was the
last great contribution of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.
The 1990s belonged to Shanghai with Premier Zhu Rongji leading an
infrastructure drive that is still going on with flair, even flashiness.
Concentrated effort in the next decade will be on Chongqing, the
awesome but soot-covered industrial city at the confluence of the Yangtze
and Jialing rivers, whose 30 million people live far inland from the
wealthy coastal cities.
Ask Osamu Kida, one of Japan's leading China Watchers, about Chongqing.
When I saw him at his former post in Shanghai last year, he tried to tell
me about the new wave in Chongqing.
Kida's life-long habit has been to read six or seven Chinese
newspapers everyday.
All I knew about Chongqing was that it used to be known as "Chungking"
when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek headquartered his Nationalist forces
there in the 1940s. It was a main base for Gen.. Claire Chennault's
American Volunteer Group or "Flying Tigers.
In 1997 Chongqing was granted special municipality status--like
Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin--to spur economic development. Foreign
investment incentives have been set up and
some money is starting to come in.
Kida says Chongqing is rich in resources and "has great potential to
become another
Shanghai." Business relationships with Japan are expanding with the
manufacturing plants of Suzuki, Honda, Isuzu and Yamaha showing the way.
Now holding a title of Special Japanese Representative in Chongqing,
Kida wrote an article for the October issue of the Japanese-language
magazine Gaiko Forum, titled "Can Chongqing become
the model of mega industrial city for the 21st century?" He managed to
sound positive and convincing without any chamber of commerce spin.
It is the world's most polluted city; Chongqing's main product is acid rain.
Kida says wryly "If you have an extra hour, drop by my office and watch
the metal furniture turn to
rust before your eyes."
Following the cultural revolution, military industry was moved to
Chongqing from the coast due to national policy and the city has been
flourishing as a major industrial base for automobile, steel and chemical
manufacturing in China.
"The idea was to decant economic development westward from the coastal
areas--and to stanch the constant eastward flow of rural migrants," wrote
Time magazine's Lori Reese recently.
High sulfur content in the coal in the area causes an acid rain problem
that is carried by winds as far away as Japan. Sister city Hiroshima has
sent experts to help on the problem.
Many experts agree that implementation of a Japan-China environmental
program signed recently will contribute more to Asia's future than any new
generation of ballistic missiles.
Edward Neilan (eneilan@crisscross.com) is a veteran journalist, based in Tokyo, who covers East Asia and writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
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