Last week my colleagues and I toured Changxing Island outside Dalian in Liaoning Province. Changxing Island is the fifth largest island in China and may possibly be the most intensive development site in the world. In simple terms, Dalian’s government has decided that they would like to focus on developing their service sector and tourism industry – which is sensible given the city’s popularity, climate and coastal location – and therefore they are developing a new location for petrochemical and heavy industry 100km to the northwest to Changxing Island.
The not so simple part involves the tens of square kilometres of land reclamation, building a city from scratch for 100,000 relocated residents, and attracting tens of billions of dollars of new manufacturing investment. Of course China does ‘big’ really well, so this is all well underway. There is a $6 billion petrochemical plant under construction on 6 sq km of reclaimed land. There is a massive ship building factory from Korea’s STX, the world’s largest ship building company, on another 5.5 sq km of reclaimed land. There were literally dozens of residential towers and shopping malls under construction. There is a deepwater port under construction. They are building rail connections to Shenyang and Dalian, the highway is brand new, the water supply is ample with additional supply being developed, and more power generation is under construction as well.
As a relatively newly minted State-level economic development zone, Dalian Changxing Island Industrial Zone (DCI), enjoys the full support of the Central government, making their likelihood of achieving the goal of being one of the world’s largest petrochemical production bases fairly good. We would also like to think that their engaging our consulting services is another indication of their likelihood of success!
As someone who has lived in China for the last 7 years, and traveled extensively around the country, I am not easily surprised by what I see, but I left Changxing Island astounded by the scale of the undertaking. I have never seen a project as ambitious as this, being done in such a compressed period of time. When you consider the second largest economy in the world is growing at a 15% nominal rate with roughly 48% of the economy devoted to Investment, I suppose it has to look something like this.
