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CONFIDENTIAL
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A useful visit.
VISIT TO SHENZHEN SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE
On 24 May, I went to the Shenzhen SEZ on a visit organised by the Hong Kong branch of the New China News Agency.
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I was shown around the city by Ding Zhiwu, a junior cadre in the Foreign Affairs Office of the Shenzhen Municipal People's Government. Ding is in his late 20s. A native of Hunan province, he studied international politics at Fudan University in Shanghai, and then joined the Foreign Affairs Department of the Peking Municipal Government. After two years there, he transferred to Shenzhen, where he has been for eight months.
He is very
3. Ding is cheerful, friendly and very talkative. enthusiastic about life in the SEZ, apparently because he was given a pay rise upon transfer (120 to 300 RMB a month) and partly because the SEZ authorities turn a blind eye to cadres having second jobs.
14. I was first taken to visit the Huaxing Science and Technology Co, a Singapore/Chinese joint venture. Ding and the Works Manager were very proud of this factory, which they described as "hi-tech". In fact, it appeared to be a simple assembly plant for computer components. The manager was rather vague when asked about the proportion of parts that were actually manufactured in China, and in the end pointed out a couple of plastic mouldings on the outside of the devices. Most of the products were exported straight back to Singapore for final assembly. The Manager said that business was good at the moment. The factory was now fully Chinese-managed. pace of work was noticeably more leisurely than in Hong Kong factories I have seen, with a certain amount of fairly blatant skiving - books and magazines being hastily concealed as we approached.
The
5. I then called on He Chuben, Deputy Director of the Planning Bureau of the Shenzhen Municipal Government. After a general introduction to the running of the SEZ, he outlined his Department's ambitious plans for the expansion of the city. The target was a population of 1.4 million by the year 2000. The most important project was the container port at Yantian. I wondered whether the new port would be able to compete with the Hong Kong container port, how the world's largest. He replied that it was intended to compete not with Hong Kong but with Canton - once Shenzhen had its own port and airport, it would replace Canton as the first city of Guangdong Province.
He remarked that there was a tendency for foreign investors to see "Shenzhen as the factory and Hong Kong as the shop" and so
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CODE 18-77
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