This is China! BLOG

Cixi: The Pot of Gold at the End of the Hangzhou Bay Bridge

Pan-fried crayfish in spicy soup; baked yams in honey sauce; roasted razor clams with scallion and soy sauce; steamed Hangzhou Bay Fish with peppers, and more. How can an Economic Development Zone with such excellent country cooking go wrong? Answer is: it can’t. And it won’t. Business will literally dump its loads in the Hangzhou Wan Bay New Zone.

I already had business in the Ningbo area and decided to drop in on a long-time acquaintance that had worked for years in the Ningbo Economic and Technological Development Zone. The success of NETDZ had propelled him to the middle of nowhere; nowhere, that is, until the Hangzhou Bay Bridge opened for traffic about two months ago. Now, the bridge, which spans the mouth of the Yangtze River from Jiaxing – an hour’s drive southwest of Shanghai – to Cixi – an hour’s drive east of Hangzhou – is the longest sea span bridge in the world. The drive itself over the bridge presents a calm sea. Quiet shores lull one to sleep almost immediately – which I did; both ways. So, outside of the gray of the Bay meeting the gray of the horizon there’s not much else I recall about the crossing except that I missed it twice. However, the drive did shave an hour to an hour-and-a-half off our journey.

The Hangzhou Wan Bay New Zone at the base of the Cixi-end of the bridge is actually an amalgamation of several zones, including the Zhejiang Cixi Economic Development Zone, the Zhejiang Cixi Export Processing Zone. Established in 2001 the total area of the New Zone is 145 square kilometers. Interestingly, the local government cannot touch the Southeast corner of the Zone for commercial development: the national government four years ago had frozen transfer of farm land to commercial use. The land was going to be left for the village already in the area.

Our host, the generous Mr. Zhang, took us on a tour of the New Zone, which is one of the most virgin I have seen in five years of traveling to Economic Development Zones throughout China. Even the Export Processing Zone, which had been established in 2005, was without companies. One of the most developed blocks of the New Zone was the European Industrial Park, which was populated ostensibly by a dozen companies from Spain.

Cixi itself is about the size of Suzhou City, 1.2 million. However, it has a distinctly underdeveloped feel to it. A morning walk through the downtown district left my throat parched and my eyes irritated from the pollution of cars and trucks and motorcycles all competing to be the most raucous mode of transportation. There were very few of the tell-tale high rises and construction cranes that mark a city looking to reinvent itself as a commercial center. I knew though, that since China’s opening up in the 1980s that Cixi had become The Plastics Capital of China; along with Yuyao and Ningbo creating a Plastics Triangle of production capability. Still, the roughed mountains with curly tree lines that defined the city limits are attractive and relaxing to watch.

Mr Zhang and my long-time acquaintance Mr Zhu rounded out our day in the New Zone by taking us a five-minute drive outside the Zone to a restaurant that was more a low-ceilinged airplane hangar than dining venue. The restaurant – The Cixi Country Family Restaurant – was actually a mock village with small wood-and-bamboo huts and running streams all within the hangar. A great assembly line of culinary delights awaited us: hundred gallon tanks of fish and shellfish; sample plates of appetizers and main courses; great pots of boiling soups.

There was no waste that night after the meal. Great food, good company, excellent prospects for a New Zone.