Tan Yifan

    cicitan2011@gmail.com

    QIANHAI, short for the Qianhai Shenzhen-Hong Kong Modern Service Industry Cooperation Zone, has been mentioned in local media many times this summer. Only a few people, however, like Dai Ruirui and his co-workers at Qianhai’s administration bureau, have a detailed picture of the future for Qianhai. They hope Qianhai will become a strategic central hub that brings Shenzheners and Hong Kongers economically and socially closer together. Qianhai will have regulations more aligned to Hong Kong than to the rest of China, and be less restrictive on foreign companies operating there.

    Dai enthusiastically introduced the uniqueness of Qianhai to Shenzhen Daily, explaining that they had conducted many trials, and when developed the Qianhai will present a new vision for a China without barriers.

    “The 15-square-kilometer land you are standing on is the result of land reclamation,” He said. “The designers have applied advanced techniques from Japan, compressing and dewatering bits of land based on their physical conditions.”

    In addition to land filling, Dai said the office building he works in was converted from large containers, which had served the China International Marine Co. for around 20 years. “Many people don’t realize that they have entered a container complex for the first time,” he said. “We reused those containers and I think it was a brilliant idea.”

    To Dai, the most surprising development is not the physical aspects of Qianhai, but the organizational structure of the administration office, “Among more than 150 staff in the administration, only the director of the bureau is a civil servant. The rest of us, including those who were transferred from other government agencies, don’t have ‘iron bowls.’”

    Dai believes they are making efforts to reshape the mindset of many Chinese who may be weary of the project. To him, Qianhai is not only going to be a modern financial, service, logistics, technology and science center. The zone will also offer the potential to break down the barriers of ideology, bureaucracy and the traditional model for economic cooperation.

    “It’s hard for people to imagine the future based on the on-going construction on the land,” he said. “But when people can travel from the center of Hong Kong to Qianhai within 30 minutes and those on the mainland can interact with the rest of the world here more easily, then they’ll realize what potential Qianhai has for them.”

    On Aug. 16, a plot of land in Qianhai was sold for 10.9 billion yuan (US$1.77 billion) to China Resources (Holdings) Co., bringing the total sales of land in Qianhai to 232.79 billion yuan. Currently, more than 1,000 enterprises have settled in Qianhai, which is expected to have a gross domestic product of 150 billion yuan by 2020.