C OvER sTORY
time between Wuxi, Jiangsu, where HOdo’s
headquarter are and its Sihanoukville park to
one-third of what it used to be. Most of the
over 109 companies in the park now have
joined in the past two years.
Kingson is more confident than ever of the
realisation of the plan for the future of the Si-
hanoukville zone. It will have 300 companies
on its 11 square kilometres of land and em-
ploy 80,000 to 100,0000 industrial workers,
compared with 160,000 now. It is expected
that the zone will become a city for people to
live in, not just a manufacturing base.
Just before the Belt and Road Forum for
International Cooperation in May this year,
several Chinese ministries published mea-
sures that have already been and will be taken
to support the Belt and Road initiative, in-
cluding financial support for overseas co-
operative industrial parks. For example, the
State Administration of Taxation announced
that they had already reached agreements
with 54 out of the 64 countries along the
Belt and Road routes to avoid dual taxation
for Chinese and foreign companies alike. The
ministries have also provided information on
investment taxation policies in 40 countries
along the Belt and Road, sent officials there
and trained taxation officials from countries
along the routes. This could benefit those
companies in the parks.
During the Belt and Road Forum, China
signed agreements on joint industrial parks
with a number of countries. China has also
proposed an action plan for technological
cooperation in ways including joint hi-tech
parks among Belt and Road countries. In
an interview with the China Economic Times
published on April 25, Zhang Wei, vice di-
rector of the Chinese Academy of Interna-
tional Trade and Economic Cooperation, a
think tank under the Ministry of Commerce,
said that China would accelerate negotiations
with host countries through agreements on
investment promotion, infrastructure, pro-
duction capacity cooperation and coopera-
tive industrial parks. Feng Zhaoyi, honorary
chairman of China-Africa TEDA Investment
Co., Ltd, the operator of a China-Egypt in-
dustrial park near the Suez Canal, disclosed
at a forum on overseas industrial parks along
the Belt and Road, sponsored by the Beijing
based think tank Centre for China and Glo-
balisation (CCG), on April 25, that TEDA
would take over the operation of 35 indus-
trial parks owned by Saudi companies.
An Yonggang, a member of the Finan-
cial Committee of the Western Returned
Scholars Association, studied and worked in
Southeast Asian countries for more than ten
years before he returned to Beijing in 2015.
He is working with his alumni from the Na-
tional University of Singapore on projects for
building and operating industrial parks in
Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa along
the Belt and Road routes. The Belt and Road
initiative was the biggest factor in his deci-
sion to come back, as he told ChinaReport.
He believes many more Chinese companies
will go abroad and they will need the parks.
Even Chinese exporters, who have had much
more direct overseas contact for longer than
Chinese investors, do not have much hands-
on overseas experience, as most of the time
they can just wait for their foreign buyers to
come to Yiwu, a wholesale export centre in
Zhejiang Province, or the annual trade fair in
Guangzhou, he added.A Window
This does not mean that the Belt and Road
initiative is a government-backed guarantee
for the success of China’s overseas cooperative
industrial parks. On the contrary, Chinese
operators and scholars have already realised
that running an industrial park faces higher
costs and risks than at home, and that certain
familiar practices used at home simply do not
work elsewhere.
Running an industrial park is much more
complicated than a company. As An ex-
plained to ChinaReport, it involves real estate
operation, financial service provision and an
understanding of the business of the enter-
prises in the park.
At the CCG forum on overseas industrial
parks, representatives from Chinese enter-
prises already running overseas industrial
parks or considering doing so stressed the
local climate factors affecting their choice,
mainly China’s political relations with the
host countries, local infrastructure and sup-
ply chain conditions and market prospects.
The climate is not always welcoming, northe local practices clear. For example, the
Chinese enterprises complained that some
local governments in India attracted Chinese
investors there and then suddenly turned
against them. Negotiations on a joint in-
dustrial park in Ethiopia were difficult until
2012 when the Ethiopian government estab-
lished a new national development strategy
in favour of drawing on China’s experience
in industrial parks. Some host countries
thought Chinese enterprises just wanted to
trick their hosts out of money, or impose the
China model there, according to Dr Tang
Xiaoyang, deputy director of the Carnegie-
Tsinghua Centre for Global Policy.
Sheng Guofei, director of the investment
promotion office of the China Chamber of
Commerce for Import and Export of Ma-
chinery and Electronic Products, noted that
the developing economies they visited during
the past two years hoped to invite firms in-
volved in high value added industries to help
upgrade their local industries and technology.
However, he said, such enterprises required
high standards for local infrastructure, sup-
ply chains and labour conditions, which were
rarely already there. He suggested that all par-
ties involved in new industrial parks abroad
would work closer to solve this in the future.
Feng Zhaoyi, honorary chairman of the
China-Africa TEDA Investment Company,
thinks it a good idea to have a big company
establish itself first, which would bring its
smaller suppliers there.
A big difference in operating an industrial
park overseas from doing so at home is that
host countries generally do not offer as strong
financial and administrative support, for ex-Long Jiang Industrial Park lies alongside the Ho
Chi Minh city – Trung Luong HighwayPhoto by xinhua