China’s State Council recently announced plans to develop the city of Chengdu, Sichuan province into a strategic interior area for an open economy as part of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) for Western Development.

The municipal Party Committee will have five strategic approaches in transportation, industry, new towns, improving older towns, and the integration of “three circles”. The five employ a scientific understanding of national and global urbanization trends to deal more actively with the regional competition.

Chengdu is doing its best to be “a core for western Chinese development with various advantages both in the world and in China, as well as in the west.

Transportation

The idea is to set up a complete transportation system for core growth in western China. Chengdu lies in China’s interior and is neither a coastal nor a border area, so transportation is the first of the five strategies to be pushed. The city is giving priority to infrastructure to build a system suitable for a core growth area in western China.

Earlier this year, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) declared the Chengdu Airport a State-level aviation hub similar to those of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. It will build a terminal T2 at the Shuangliu Airport, with two terminals in all on a 428,000-square-meter area that can handle 50 million passengers annually. The airport will be western China’s largest and the fourth largest in the country.

Chengdu is also the largest railway hub for southwestern China and is planning a “two rings, 10 radials” railway network. It expects to complete some key projects in 3~5 years, including the Chengdu-Mianyang-Leshan PDL and Chengdu-Chongqing PDL. It will also build some 4-hour high-speed railway routes to the cities of Lanzhou, Kunming, Xi’an, and Wuhan, and 8-hour high-speed routes to Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Pearl River Delta, and Yangtze River Delta. Construction work is underway on a West China railway hub that connects South, Central, Southwest, and Northwest China, and ultimately Central Asia and South Asia.

In the area of expressways, Chengdu is planning a “three rings, 12 radials” network, with 776 kilometers of expressways in the city itself, with a 2-hour route to Chongqing and an 8-hour one to Kunming, Guiyang, and Xi’an. It will have an expressway network extending in all directions, linking the western part with the whole country by 2013.

Chengdu also has a broadband strategy and is speeding up work on an optical network city and wireless city. It is a basic regional communications hub with access to the rest of the country and the world. In Feb, China Telecom and China Mobile signed a cloud computing base agreement and western data center agreement with Chengdu, as a further indication of its importance as a communications hub for western China. Industrial multiplication

This involves consolidating industries to support to core role in western Chinese growth. Chengdu’s “industrial multiplication” strategy is to encourage the transferring industries, increasing global industrial cooperation and marketing, and developing urban agriculture and the modern service industry. It recognizes that Chengdu’s industrial foundation is not solid and its competence not the best, so it is putting emphasis on the electronic information, automobile, finance, and trade sectors.

Among the international electronic information giants that have settled in Chengdu are Dell, Lenovo, Compal, and Wistron. It expects that, by October, it will have a production capacity of 100 million computers, or about 20 percent of the world’s total. In automobiles, with global car makers VW, Toyota, Volvo, Chengdu expects be the sixth pillar of Chinese auto making, after Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing and Changchun. In 2012, the good news just keeps pouring in. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology declared Chengdu to be “a famous software city” and the world’s largest auto parts supplier, Germany’s Bosch, established a “Bosch West China Industrial Base” in Chengdu. In addition, South Korea’s second largest commercial bank and only state-owned bank, Woori Bank, opened a branch in Chengdu, its first central and western China branch, bringing the number of foreign banks here to 13. Also, South Korea’s Lotte Group, a Global 500 company, opened a Lotte Department Store in the Tianfu New District of Chengdu.

New towns and better old towns

One way to strengthen the engine of growth of the western economy is to build new towns, as represented by the Tianfu New District, and renovate older towns, for example the downtown area, a strategy that also adds power to Chengdu’s development..

Last April, the State Council, in response to the Chengdu-Chongqing Economic Zone plan, said that the Tianfu New District was an important part of the Zone. So, work on the New District officially began on Dec 25, 2011. The Tianfu New District is expected to be a western Chinese site for economic, technical, information, and cultural exchanges and cooperation with the rest of the world.

The New District is designed as a high-tech industrial base with the electronic information, new materials, and biotechnology sectors at the center, and a manufacturing base focused on the R&D, automobile, aerospace, and and energy conservation, environmental protection sectors. Each base is expected to have an output value of more than a trillion yuan.

Reconstruction work on the older towns has also begun, especially with the Chengdu North Upgrade Program, a major part of the downtown renovation, which began on Feb 5. It involves both construction and renovation in modernizing industries, with international styles, and a sound ecology in the northern part of Chengdu over a five-year period. It is expected to encompass 360 projects at a total cost of 330 billion yuan ($52.4 billion).

Chengdu will have an integrated, dual-center, new urban development pattern with the downtown area and Tianfu New District as cores for the prosperity of both. At this turning point, Chengdu has set sail in a new direction and the response to the future is becoming clearer.