According to this article from TheEdgeDaily, Tianjin will be China’s next guinea pig in testing market-based reforms:

Imagine a corner of China where the yuan is freely traded, banks can offer a full range of financial services and farmers receive fair compensation when they have to leave the land.

It sounds far-fetched, but that is exactly what could happen before long under plans to turn the Tianjin Binhai New Area into a test-bed for market-orientated reforms that, if successful, could shape China’s economic future.
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Beijing also wants Binhai, which lies about 200km southeast of the capital, to show the way in tackling income inequality and environmental degradation at the same time as jumping up the value chain by developing new technologies.

In short, the Binhai experiment is meant to come up with the new model of balanced economic development that China’s leaders, worried by growing inequality and pollution, have been seeking with growing urgency.

Wang Kai, head of the policy research department for Binhai New Area, is under no illusion about the enormity of the task.

“There’s no roadmap for us to follow,” he said. “We’ll be creating a new path with every step we take.”

Tianjin Binhai, about four times bigger than Shanghai’s futuristic Pudong New Area, is already a thriving manufacturing centre.

Motorola churned out nearly US$9 billion worth of handsets and other telecoms equipment in 2005. Toyota, Samsung and GlaxoSmithKline all have plants here, while Airbus recently chose Binhai as the site for a plant to make A320 single-aisle jets.

But Pi Qiansheng, a senior local official, has a much grander vision. He wants Binhai to account for 2% to 2.5% of China’s economy within a decade, compared with just under 1% now.

It will be interesting to see if they can meet their growth objectives while maintaining their model of “balanced economic development”.

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