S’pore taps its strengths to facilitate trade and investment between China and other regions

QINZHOU/CHONGQING – When paramount leader Deng Xiaoping put China on a track to grow its economy at all costs in the 1980s, he decided the coastal region would take precedence.

The western hinterland would have to wait its turn as its eastern and south-eastern neighbours from Shanghai to Shenzhen got rich first.

In 2000, the time came for the west when then president Jiang Zemin got the ball rolling on a development strategy for the 12 provinces from Xinjiang to Sichuan, prioritising infrastructure building and attracting foreign investment.

Two decades on, the wealth and development disparity between the west and the east remains significant: the western region accounted for just 21.4 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2022, up slightly from 19.6 per cent a decade earlier.

But things are changing in China’s west: factories are moving inland from traditional manufacturing hubs in the east as investors pivot to new industries, and China is seeking out South-east Asia’s rapidly growing middle-class consumers for its goods.

Trade-dependent Singapore, always on the lookout for opportunities to make itself relevant to other countries, saw a way in, when both countries were looking for a third government project to collaborate on that would dovetail with Beijing’s national agenda. The first two are the Suzhou Industrial Park which started in 1994 and the Tianjin Eco-City that began in 2007.

Just as it had played a significant role in supporting China’s reform and opening up which began in the late 1970s, Singapore was, as Chinese officials often like to repeat, one of the earliest backers of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).