West China: Why FDI Should Consider the Region

Op-Ed Commentary: Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Sept. 2 – Following the conclusion of our series of articles about investing in China’s western regions, I believe that foreign investors would do well to look at these emerging markets in China. As sales markets in the United States and Europe remain stagnant following the global recession and growth remains slow, China’s western regions offer a way out. For sure, they are emerging markets in their own right, and possess their own pricing and cultural sensitivities. Yet they also represent a huge potential market in terms of volumes. Read the rest of this entry »

New Special Economic Zone in Yili, Near Kazakhstan Border

Sept. 1 – China has ratified a new special economic zone in Yili, in northwestern Xinjiang near the border with Kazakhstan. The area is already China’s only Kazakh autonomous prefecture, populated mainly by ethnic Kazakhs. The prefecture has a total population of four million with about 500,000 living in the city of Yining, also known as Ghulja. The 200-square-kilometer zone will transform the nearby border port at Khorgas into a center for trade with Kazakhstan, including container transportation, processing facilities and the promotion of tourism in both Kazakhstan and Xinjiang. Read the rest of this entry »

Investing in Yunnan: ASEAN, Adventure Tourism, Myanmar and India’s Elephant in the Backyard

By Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Aug. 31 – Yunnan has always been an enigmatic province; encompassing four major Chinese minorities influenced by Vietnam, India, Burma and Tibet, and home to the very eastern end of the Himalayan ranges, it is never a simple region to categorize.

However, due to booming trade with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) free trade area, the central government has begun to pay more attention to China’s most southwest province. The priority has been upgrading Yunnan’s transport links internationally in order to connect it to countries across the ASEAN region and to its provincial neighbors within China.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ningxia to Host China-Arab States Trade Forum

Aug. 30 – Yinchuan, the capital city of Ningxia, will host the first China-Arab Trade Forum in a bid to further align itself with Arabic investment in hopes of securing petro-dollar investments.

Yinchuan is an ancient Silk Road city with a strong population of Muslims, many of them Arabic and Persian descendants of early Silk Road travelers. The Bank of Ningxia launched an Islamic services unit last December, which applies Shariah law to lending practices. Since then, the unit has conducted more than RMB70 million worth of business, demonstrating that there is a market for such services. Read the rest of this entry »

Qinghai – Agriculture, Eco-Tourism, Tibet…And India?

By Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Aug. 27 – In my quest several years ago to obtain clients for Dezan Shira & Associates in every single province in China, it was obvious from the outset that in order to speak sensibly about each location, I would need to travel there.

In many of the provinces, some of them far flung, I also needed to solve the not insignificant problem of generating clients that were actually interested in investing in the western regions – a subject early issues of China Briefing magazine would solve as we featured, monthly, cities that were completely off the radar some 10 to 15 years ago. That combination of good old fashioned exploration and our marketing and intelligence facilities worked, however, and we began to generate clients who were amongst some of the earliest foreign investors in the western regions. Read the rest of this entry »

Tibet to Launch Own Airline

Aug. 26 – Tibet is following other provinces in China and is to have its own airline, with operations set to start from August next year.

The company, which has just recently been granted state-level approval, has been formed and is a joint venture between the Tibet Autonomous Region Investment Co. holding the majority stake of 51 percent and Tibet Sanli Investment and Tibet Ruiyi Investment holding 39 percent and 10 percent shares, respectively.

Tibet Airlines has already purchased three Airbus A319s, and hopes to introduce services from August 2011. Tibet is currently served by six airlines operating 16 routes, including Air China and Sichuan Airlines who make up the bulk of the traffic and scheduled weekly flights also being made by China Southern, China Eastern, Shenzhen Airlines and Hainan Air. Read the rest of this entry »

Investment Opportunities in Chengdu, Chongqing and Sichuan

By Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Aug. 25 – Sichuan is the powerhouse of China’s southwest and has gained increased attention since the implementation of the Go West policy back in 2000. The province has benefited from lower operating costs than the eastern and central regions, with the added attraction of a massive population. Sichuan (including Chongqing) has a total market of some 120 million people. A survey of foreign managers conducted by the World Bank cited this as a major reason for investing in the province. However, the same study suggested that underdeveloped transport infrastructure (it takes seven to ten days to transport goods to and from the nearest seaport), unreliable electrical power supply, and the difficulty in recruiting and retaining professionals had held back the province’s development. However, this also is indicative of a regional emerging market with infrastructure investment potential. Read the rest of this entry »

Shaanxi: China’s National Science and Engineering Development Hub

By Chris Devonshire-Ellis and Fabian Knopf

Aug. 24 – Resource-rich Shaanxi has seen significant developments in the past few years, as this most traditional of Chinese provinces enters a new century full of hope, promise and a gleaming makeover of its capital city, Xi’an.

Like the most attractive of China’s magnets for investment, Shaanxi can rely on more than one component part for attracting development and creating opportunities. Coal supplies are plentiful and of a high quality, while the province also has large reserves of natural gas and oil. While that does give it a more hardened feel to life here, the province also boasts a rich cultural history, and that, coupled with excellence in engineering academia, gives Shaanxi a fairly unique character not found elsewhere in China. From the historical perspective, Shaanxi is considered one of the cradles of Chinese civilization. Read the rest of this entry »

Guangxi: China’s Direct Link to Southeast Asia

By Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Aug. 23 – Guangxi, in China’s southwest, has the geographic advantage of being in close proximity to other Southeast Asian countries, the world class financial center of Hong Kong, and Guangdong Province, China’s wealthiest and its largest manufacturing base. Bordering Vietnam to the west, Guangxi is connected to Hong Kong and Macau by the Xi River, and is China’s only western region with open sea port facilities. The government has placed emphasis on the importance of the province and its development in the coming years and even more so when it comes to future China-ASEAN cooperation. Trade agreements signed between China and ASEAN, as well as with many ASEAN member countries directly, including the scrapping of inter-regional tariffs, are in the process of re-energizing Southeast Asia and massively increasing trade. Guangxi is set to massively benefit from this. Read the rest of this entry »

Investing in Tibet, the Roof of the World

By Chris Devonshire-Ellis

Aug. 20 – Foreign direct investment in Tibet is often a contentious issue, as Holiday Inn discovered following a shareholder revolt over their managed property in Lhasa a few years back. On the basis that running a hotel on the roof of the world demonstrated unwelcome support for China’s administration of the territory, a group of lobbyists got together and promoted the boycotting of Holiday Inn until they pulled out of Tibet. The campaign worked. Holiday Inn, alarmed at a potential drop in revenues, canceled their contract and the only Western managed major hotel chain in Lhasa ended its operations. It did little, however, to the Tibetan economy or to the hotel. Rebranded and now under fully Chinese management, all the protesters accomplished was a drop in revenues for Holiday Inn, and a decline in service and standards in Lhasa for the international traveler. The hotel is still there. Read the rest of this entry »

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