Press Interpreter

02/24/06 -- Since the Six Dynasties period, the Yangtze River delta has been famed for its prosperity.

Today, the 210,700 square kilometers of the Yangtze River delta contain 74 cities of small, medium, or large size, of which 16 count as large cities with population greater than 1 million people, and 8 count as especially large cities, with population greater than 2 million. This "15+1" cluster of cities has already become one of the world most energetic city groups.

At the end of 2004, this region containing 2.19% of the land of the entire country and 10.28% of the population (using 2004 data), created nearly a quarter of the value of national output, a third of all exports, attracted two fifths of foreign investment, and had already become the engine of China's rising economic power. In 2004, when the GDP of the entire country increased by 1.9263 trillion yuan, the Yangtze River delta contributed 609.9 billion yuan, a rate of 31.66%.

In the soon to be published "Yangtze River Delta Blue Book,"* expert scholars at the Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai institutes of social science issue a call: in order to realize "two initiatives" for the sustainable development of the Yangtze River Delta, we must accelerate the pace of regional cooperation and dare to strike out in "new directions" in the unification of the economic and social development of the region.

Breakthroughs in Regional Cooperation: Transportation -- Environmental Protection -- Information Networks -- "Yangtze River Delta Initiatives for Regional Cooperation and Sustainable Development"

By Han Hanjun, Economic Research Center of the Shanghai Institute of Social Sciences

Regional economic cooperation takes place on several different levels: there are the levels of goods, of the factors of production, and of government policy. Accordingly, we must cooperate by climbing from cooperation among business and industrial departments to cooperation at the government level. The highest form of regional economic cooperation is the unification of regional economies. Regional economic unification means two things: first, it means eliminating man-made restrictions and barriers to economic activity between parts of the region -- the markets of each part must converge; second, it means that each part must sign an agreement or treaty increasing the unification of economic policies and measures. This should be done even to the point of going over the heads of the localities to give national administrators jurisdiction over organizing the structure of unification and over implementing unification policies and measures. Academics say that the unification of functions comes before the unification of systems. The development of functional unification arises from the internal needs of the markets of the various parts of the region, while systemic unification is a deeper process of conceptual convergence.

Manufacturing industry is developing rapidly in the Yangtze River delta, but its homogeneity is creating an increasingly clear "bottleneck" effect. According to calculations made by the International Industrial Research Center of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, the similarity coefficient relating Shanghai's industrial structure to Jiangsu Province's was .82, that relating Shanghai's industrial structure to Zhejiang Province's was .76, and that relating Zhejiang's to Jiangsu's was .97! Industrial homogeneity puts a great deal of pressure on raw materials, energy, and even land. Thus the blessing of amassing large amounts of industial capital can translate into the evil of excess capacity.

[Remaining text untranslated]

By Zheng Wei, reporter, and Wu Yue, intern

*A "blue book" is a government report.

--Translated by Ramsi Woodcock

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