A city where success dots the landscape
Looking across the vast river at a panorama of neonlit futuristic buildings, one could be forgiven for thinking you were actually in Shanghai.
The view in front of me was Chongqing at night, now very clearly carving a new path for itself in the 21st century.
Shanghai, in fact, remains 2,000 kilometers downstream of that mighty river and many cruise ships and freight traffic still make that journey.
But river access to China’s Eastern Seaboard is no longer the only game in town for China’s western megacity.
With a rail connection that takes just 12 days to Duisburg in Germany and its Southern Transport Corridor a land and sea route via the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region to Myanmar, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore, the metropolis is now a key hub of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
I was in the municipality to visit the Liangjiang New Area, the only inland such designated area in China, which by 2020 will cover 60 percent of the city’s industrial land and be home to half of the city’s 30 million population.
Several days of rain — apparently, a typical feature of spring before the caldron heat of the summer — did little to dampen the sense that the city was now very much a happening place.
Han Baochang, director general of the China-Singapore (Chongqing) Demonstration Initiative on Strategic Connectivity, is certainly someone who enthuses about the city’s new pivotal role in China’s development.
“We are trying our best to create an international trade distribution center here in Chongqing to help it become an international logistics hub in a very real sense,” he said in his office in the city’s modern Jiangbeizui financial district.
This new connectivity looks like finally putting Chongqing on the international map.
Although the wartime capital of China and with a long and rich history, it is sometimes referred to as the biggest city in the world that no one has ever heard of — although this is perhaps more due to a general ignorance about China in the West than any failure on Chongqing’s part.
One particularly exciting initiative is its plan to become the world’s thirdlargest coffee futures market after London and New York.
The Chongqing Coffee Exchange was set up in June 2016.
It will enable coffee producers in Yunnan province, China’s main coffee growing area, to get a better price for their beans but also act as an exchange for coffee producers from South East Asia and also from Ethiopia, from where there has already been a lot of interest.
Peng De, general manager of the exchange, said, while sipping a strong Yunnan espresso, at the company’s offices, that it was the Belt and Road that had made this all possible.
“Without it, I don’t think we could do this thing in China. The coffee consumption of the countries along the Belt and Road is growing very fast. It is a big potential market for Chinese coffee farmers.”
What is also evident in Chongqing is some of the results of another of the national strategies, Made in China 2025 with companies involved in a number of activities such as artificial intelligence and big data.
It is clear, however, Chongqing is not only now very much a part of, but also prospering from, China’s new era.