New zone for maritime economic development

Rongcheng is Shandong province's largest wind power farm. Provided to China Daily

Over the next few years Shandong province will be looking at the Yellow River Delta and the Shandong Peninsula Economic Zone to improve the economic structure and development pattern, the governor has said.

The peninsula's economic zone is China's first economic zone based on a maritime economy, Governor Jiang Daming explained.

The economic zone stretches along a more than 3,000-kilometer coastline, through the cities of Qingdao, Dongying,Yantai,Weihai,Weifang,Rizhao,Binzhou, and covers 160,000 square kilometers of sea.

There was a meeting in Beijing on February 28 to discuss 200 projects in the zone. They are worth 851.2 billion yuan ($129.5 billion). Contracts on about two dozen of them were signed, worth more than 254.9 billion yuan.

Loans for the projects are expected to come from financial institutions like the Bank of China and China Construction Bank.

Shandong has already started 322 of the projects to speed up maritime economic development. These cover a range from ports to airports, railways to highways, energy to electronic technology, according to the local government.

Shandong plans to spend 1.4 trillion yuan by 2020 on eight industries near its various port cities, in marine biology, marine equipment manufacturing, marine energy, marine minerals, fisheries, marine transportation and tourism, marine construction, and environment protection.

Shandong already has the harbors of Qingdao, Rizhao and Yantai, each with more than 100 million tons of cargo throughput. It is looking to build a northeast Asia international maritime center designed to cover container shipping and ore, coal and oil.

Yellow River Delta

The delta plan, for improving its ecology, was approved by China's State Council in November 2009, making it part of the nation's regional development strategy.

The Yellow River Delta has advantages and great development potential since it is on the southwestern part of Bohai Bay, to the south of Beijing and Tianjin, Jiang pointed out.

"This is China's first eco-efficient economic zone and it will increase Shandong's strengths overall."

In explaining "eco-efficient" in greater detail, he said the idea is to develop it in such a way that it is both socially and economically sustainable.

By 2015, the Yellow River Delta's GDP is expected to reach 930 billion yuan, according to the provincial development outline.

Enriching people

"Shandong has had sound development over the past five years and has laid a solid foundation for the next five years," Jiang said.

Official data show Shandong's GDP, for 2010, reaching 3.9 trillion yuan.

Jiang said that their ultimate goal actually is to enrich their people and, for this, the next five years are crucial.

Shandong spent more than 211.51 billion yuan raising the standard of living last year, an increase of 6.2 percentage points over 2005, the final year of the 10th Five-Year Plan (2001-2005), according to the latest statistics.

Per capita disposable income of urbanites saw an average annual increase of 12 percent over the past five years, reaching 19,946 yuan in 2010; incomes of rural people rose 14.2 percent, to 6,990 yuan, according to official data.

(China Daily 03/09/2011 page24)