This is China! BLOG

Nanjing Jiangning: A Healthy Investment Environment

I really like going out to Jiangning, in Jiangsu Province, a thirty-minute drive south of Nanjing. The half-dozen times I’ve been to Jiangning on site selection projects I always leave the township in a good mood. Must be the Feng Shui. Feng Shui literally means in Chinese language Wind Water: it is a way of looking at a human being’s placement in physical space and the degree to which the individual and the environment harmonize. Jiangning – or at least the provincial level Economic Development Zone (EDZ) under its administration – has some of the best Feng Shui of any EDZ I’ve ever visited in China – and I’ve visited quite a few over the past five years here in China. Where as Nanjing is a great, dirty, congested and noisy provincial capital city, Jiangning is a pictaresque, well-laid out town with a consistently friendly population.

In fact, Jiangning was one of the first EDZs I ever visited in China, nearly five years ago. Back then, there was pretty much just its smart looking administrative headquarters embraced by a tree-stitched hill. There were a few factories back then, but the place was really more an architectural blueprint of the shape of things to come. I remember the tour around the Park, during which then-Director was always making sweeping gestures about where this residential area would be rooted and that set of manufacturing compounds would be built. It was difficult for me to visualize – they hadn’t even had their gargantuan plastic model of the city built yet – for all there was at that time was trees, dirt and the great modern metal sculpture that marks the center of the first phase of the industrial park.

I remember talk some four years ago about where Ford Motor company along with Changan Automobile of Chongqing fame was going to put its next billion-dollar facility. The buzz had it it would be near Nanjing, in some unknown district. Turns out to have been Jiangning, where Ford has trucks rolling about the streets with crates of components. Mazda, Fiat and Morita have settled down in the area, too.

In addition to automobile manufacturing, Jiangning focuses on electronic information, electrical controls, R&D and software development. Heavy hitters such as Motorola, Ericsson, BASF, Siemens, Lucent and Microsoft have bases in the Park. Indeed, it was just recently that Ascendas Corporation, a Singaporean real estate developer, invited me out to the grand opening of its iHub. Ascendas introduced the concept of the pre-built factory space to China’s economic development zones, opening the first in the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park. The iHub is nearly 20,000 square meters large, with five multi-story buildings that support office space, an exhibition center and a car park. Though already within easy access to supermarkets, hospitals, hotels and even golf courses, iHub houses a business center, post office, restaurants, cafes, a travel agency and banks.

The iHub opening on 1 November 2007 swelled with VIPs from Jiangsu provincial government, Nanjing municipal government, and from the Singaporean business and government communities. The best part of the opening, though – after all the speeches - was the drum corp, reminiscent of Japanese Taiko drummers. With Nanjing identified by China’s Central Government as one of the ten cities in China set to be a center for IT, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and R&D, Jiangning and Ascendas through its iHub project are certainly poised for a bright investment future.

Bill Dodson
SUZHOU, China