2005年NPR美国国家公共电台八月-China Seeks Cheaper Labor Within Its Bord

Another story about China now. This one has to do with the country’s economy. Most of China’s phenomenal growth is taking place in regions along the coast. For the inland, many people have been left behind. But now China's west and mid 1-west are starting to catch up. NPR’s Rob Gifford takes us to the central city of Hefei.

“You've probably never heard of Hefei, but if the leaders of this city of nearly 4 million people have their way, within a few years you’ll know all about it. Hefei is about 300 miles west of Shanghai. It is a rather nondescript city, the capital of Anhui province in the rice belt of central China. But Hefei has several things going for it. It has, for some reason, among the best technical universities in the country. It has increasingly fast links to the coast and has something of a visionary local government. On the edge of town, on what used to be a state-owned pig farm, the vision of Hefei's government is being put into practice.

Earthmoving equipment clears the land for new buildings, some of which are already under construction nearby. This will eventually be the site of a science city, a high-tech 2 park covering nearly 20 square miles, where the Hefei government is offering massive financial incentives 3 to high-tech companies both local and foreign. “It’s already attracted one-and-three-quarter billion dollars of investment,” says manager of the park, Jin Rei.

“We want Hefei to become a top level high-tech city. It can become such a place. Through working hard over the next fifteen years, we want Hefei to be the Silicon 4 Valley of China.”

The move from incubating pigs to incubating high-tech companies is highly symbolic 5. As some cities in central China with central government support try to leapfrog from the agricultural age to the technological 6, there is still plenty of the industrial revolution going on here, though. And officials admit that their high-tech ambitions will take time. But the city already has a smaller high-tech park which has been incubating small companies for several years and is now attracting big hitters like Microsoft which has opened a research center here and U.S. video conferencing company Webaks. (With millions of online meetings, Webaks is taking the conference call to a whole new level)

Grace Gao of Webaks’ human resources department gives a guided tour of the company’s Hefei headquarters. She says they have more than 300 software engineers here linking up daily with their offices in the U.S. and elsewhere in China. Gao says they were attracted to Hefei for many reasons.

“Hefei has many high quality engineers from very good universities, so it's a very attractive city. The government gives us good incentives, too. We could never afford such massive office space without local government policies to help us."

Some other companies are clearly feeling the same. British conglomerate 7 Unilever just moved its Chinese production operations to Hefei from Shanghai. It is now only four and a half hours from Hefei to Shanghai on the newly built highway and less than three by the new high-speed rail link.

Hefei offers a well-educated workforce 8 sometimes for about a third of the cost of hiring in Shanghai. The government is also working overtime 9 to make Hefei a more livable city.

A recent concert by the Youth Orchestra of Hefei’s sister city Columbus, Ohio was just one event this summer aimed at promoting the arts and showing that Hefei is more than just an industrial or high-tech production base.

Foreign students who lived in Hefei as recently as the mid 1990s say it was a desperate place: nothing to do, no good infrastructure 10 and nothing to see. There is still a long way to go before Hefei becomes the international city it wants to be. But when you look at what else China has achieved in 25 years, you might not want to bet against it.

Rob Gifford NPR news, Hefei central China.