Independent Innovation

    Wanjiang City Belt has brought abundant business opportunities to Wuhu. According to Wang Ziqiang, chief economist of the municipal development and reform commission, currently 275 projects with investment exceeding RMB 100 million are being undertaken in the city; 37 of these are worth billions and 13 of them worth tens of billions RMB. Their investors are mostly from the Yangtze Delta, the Pearl River Delta and other eastern coastal regions, and most of them are engaged in advanced manufacturing and new industries of strategic importance. Media Group from Guangdong is a case in point: its added investment into its Wuhu assets amounts to nearly RMB 5 billion. Gree Air-conditioners and other big names have also set up production and R&D facilities in Wuhu.

    Riding atop the industrial wave is Wuhu-based Chery Automobile, the pride of the city. Since construction of its production facility started in March 1997, the company has grown at lightning speed. By 2010 two million cars had rolled off its production lines. Chery attributes its high growth speed to its in-house research and development.

    Chery has a 6,000-strong international R&D corps and invests 10 percent of its annual revenue into product R&D. It has formed an independent innovation capability for all its operations – private cars, business sedans, engines, gearboxes, and parts and components – and it holds independent intellectual property rights for key materials and core technologies.

    Chery exports its cars to over 80 countries and regions. It has established 16 production bases in 15 countries and has formed working relations with many world-class businesses, such as AVL of Austria and Johnson Controls, PPG and Quantum LLC of the U.S.

Cultural Industry

    As I toured the Wanjiang Belt cities, most of the talk was of dry project names, industrial terms and statistics. In Chizhou things were different. As soon as I entered the Anhui Zhong Cartoon offices, I was struck by the cartoon pictures displayed, by the animations screened on its walls, and by what its animators were creating on their computers.

    According to General Manager Du Panfeng, Zhong Cartoon is working on Little Monk of Mount Jiuhua, a 52-part series to be released this summer. The story is based on folk tales and religious legends from the areas around Jiuhua Mountain, a Buddhist place of pilgrimage in Anhui.

    Besides making animated cartoons, the company is also engaged in the development and production of spin-offs, such as computer games, books, toys and garments.

    In recent years, Chizhou has tried to develop its animation industry as the "most promising industrial growth point." The city government has worked out preferential policies in land use, taxation and financing to encourage animation investors to Chizhou.

    Zhong Cartoon also has properties in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. It came to Anhui because Chizhou favors cultural enterprises and has set up an animation industrial park, where the company believes it has great prospects for growth.

    Chizhou has rich cultural resources, a good foundation for the development of cultural industries. It plans to concentrate on animation production and innovation, outsourced services and personnel training in the coming few years.

A Bigger Cake for Tongling

    While researching this piece in Tongling, the local TV station turned the tables and interviewed me! They asked me what aspect of Tongling impressed me most and how the city should handle industrial transfers.

    To my mind, what is special about Tongling is its copper tradition and they should exploit and hone that competitive advantage to the max.

    Tongling is an ancient copper capital of China, and copper metallurgy here goes back 3,000 years. The city was born of its copper industry and the two have grown in tandem. Its aim is to become a world copper capital.

    "But our current industrial chain is short, composed mainly of metallurgy and primary processing," confessed Yao Yuzhou, secretary of the CPC Tongling Municipal Committee. He expressed great interest in attracting transferring enterprises engaged in copper-related downstream processing and high and new technologies, in order to upgrade and extend the city's copper industry chain.

    Zhejiang Hailiang Group is such an investment in Tongling. The group ranks 196th among China's top 500 businesses and seventh among China's top 500 private companies. Its core operation is copper processing.

    According to General Manager Fu Linzhong, the first stage of Hailiang Industrial Park has an annual capacity of 48,000 tons of precision-made copper tubes produced in an energy-efficient, environment-friendly process. The raw materials are locally sourced and the finished products are also sold locally – to Gree and Midea, China's two largest producers of air conditioners.

    Mr. Yao describes Tongling's development goal as making a bigger "economic cake" for its citizens to share. He says that the local safety and happiness indices and sense of belonging have been rising along with local economic development. He also pledges that the city will protect its eco-environment for the benefit of its citizens and their offspring even it means a slower rate of growth.