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At Dalian, we visited a Japanese investment, Canon Business Machines. As
in some of the Japanese investments seen in our previous visit to China, this one, although colossal in the size of its investment and scale of operation, appeared to be just an assembly operation with little technology transfer to
local Chinese companies, and North China was in many cases, taken by the Japanese merely as a convenient source of cheap land and labour close to Japan (paras. 65 - 69).
We visited a brewery in Qingdao producing Tsingtao beer which we felt could
have been more enterprising such as venturing into the production of beer
cans than buying them all the way from Guangzhou (paras. 39 - 43).
We also visited two state-owned factories in Dalian, one producing garments
and the other refrigerator equipment. The garment factory, though a
showcase factory with numerous production awards, was no more than a
subcontractor of the state with little say in its production and sales. The
refrigerator equipment factory, which had been given the authority to manage
its own business and could retain the bulk of its earnings, had the freedom
and incentive for further expansion of the scope of its business activities
(paras. 71 - 75)
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