China lays out plans to revive its Northeast economy

BEIJING - With most Northeastern provinces stagnating around the bottom six of China’s regional GDP growth rates for the first half of 2014, the State Council has listed on its website 35 new measures to revitaliSe the region’s economy. These measures all aim to free up private businesses, deepen State-owned Enterprise (SOE) reforms, and essentially modernise agricultural, urban and infrastructure projects in the provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang.

The 35 measures include: 1) Speeding up construction of eight rail lines; 2) Building and expanding 10 regional airports; 3) Encouraging SOEs to sell equities to private and foreign investors in the hope of building a mixed ownership system; 4) Establishing a new State-owned regional investment company to reorganise poorly-run SOEs; and 5) Strengthening the region’s status as a core grain production base.

The region is famous for pioneering China’s industrialisation efforts in the 1950s and 1970s, gaining a reputation as China’s “rustbelt”, but with most of the major companies in the area being SOEs that respond slowly to market changes, the Northeast has gradually fallen behind the rest of China in terms of economic growth. www.webershandwick.cn (ATI).