One township in Anhui province has some big dreams of becoming a real city and a regional logistics, trade and industrial center within five years, by relying on its geographic advantages of lying close to the Yangtze River Delta hub cities.

Chahe township is only 28 kilometers - less than half an hour by car - from the downtown area of Nanjing, the capital of neighboring Jiangsu province and an economic hub itself.

It takes only an hour to get to Nanjing Lukou International Airport.

Chahe is even closer to Nanjing's Northern Yangtze New District, which is home to some prominent universities such as Nanjing University, Southeast University, Nanjing Audit University, and the Nanjing University of Information Sciences and Technology.

The township is just a few miles from several of Nanjing's booming economic zones and parks - the Nanjing Chemical Industry Park, for example, and the Liuhe, Pukou, and Binjiang economic development zones.

It was Chahe's special location, that the government of Lai'an county, where Chahe is located, had in mind when it decided, in May 2010, to build a city out of the township - Chahe New Town. The plan was examined and endorsed by a panel of experts this March.

It calls for a 50-square-kilometer piece of land for an industrial, trade and logistics center that connect the city of Nanjing with Chuzhou, Lai'an and Quanjiao in Anhui.

It will have four parts: a Chahe economic development zone, Nanjing Bay trade and logistics park, Chahe urban-rural integration project, and an old Chahe renovation project.

By 2015, the Chahe New Town is expected to cover an 18-sq-km area and have a population of 150,000. It will also have a gross domestic product (GDP) of 4 billion yuan.

By 2030, it will expand to 50 sq km, with a population of 300,000 and a GDP of 20 billion yuan a year.

One major focus of development will be the logistics industry and construction work began on the Nanjing Bay trade and logistic park a year ago. It will handle lighting equipment, furniture, automobiles and auto parts, and industrial raw materials.

Ultimately, it is expected to accommodate as many as 100,000 companies and firms and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

According to the Lai'an county government's 12th five-year plan (2011-2015), the park will cover 10 sq km, and do 300 billion yuan worth of business, in three to five years.

Currently, its largest enterprise is the Golden Sun Home Dcor City Co, which is building a trade and warehousing facility for decorative and building materials.

The facility is set to cost 1.3 billion yuan and have a floor space of 1 million sq m, and do more than 10 billion yuan in business annually when it is completed.

Meanwhile, the Chahe economic development zone, had already attracted 124 companies by the end of October, with 10.58 billion yuan in investment in all.

The new town project has already had an effect on renovation work in older parts of Chahe - on a 1.22-sq-km island. This project will need about 15 billion yuan in investment.

The New Town project will obviously provide some good opportunities for China's real estate developers.

Country Garden, for example, a listed real estate developer, has plans to put 40 billion yuan into a residential community that covers more than 260 hectares. Other developers have ideas about residential projects in the area as well.

To make sure that everything in the New Town goes according to plan, the local government had already laid down more than 32 km of roads, put up 12 bridges, fixed 820 street lamps, and laid down 19.3 km of water pipes, and 19.9 km of telecommunication cables.

(China Daily 12/09/2011 page57)