Overview
China's rapid economic growth has attracted the attention of foreign investors all over the world, and the flow of foreign investment into China has had much to do with the country's establishment of development zones and industrial parks.
Collectively called “industrial parks”, these parks – economic- and technological-development zones, high-tech development zones, free-trade zones, and export-processing zones – promise a developed infrastructure, a relatively efficient administration and above all, attractive business terms.
Upon opening its doors to the world, China implemented a series of pilot projects to encourage economic and developmental growth. In the early 1980s, four Special Economic Zones (SEZs), namely, Shenzhen, Xiamen, Zhuhai, and Shantou, were established in an attempt to attract foreign investment. In SEZs, special policies were adopted to facilitate foreign investment, and preferential tax policies were implemented. In 1988, the final SEZ was established in the Hainan province.
At the beginning, the establishment of SEZs was largely intended to attract investment from overseas Chinese; in particular, Cantonese-, Hokkien- and Teochew-dialect groups in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and south-east Asian countries. This strategy proved to be a great success.
Encouraged by a visit to several SEZs in 1984, Deng Xiaoping, the master planner of China's reform policies, saw that in addition to existing SEZs, China could further designate several other cities in the coastal regions as development zones. While these zones would not be called SEZs, they would adopt some of the policies present in the SEZs.
By the end of 2002, a total of 6866 industrial parks had been set up in China, including state-level, provincial, municipal and county-level industrial parks. However, since 2003, China has launched rectification for the industrial parks in order to normalize the land usage, and cut the amount of industrial parks to 1568 by the end of 2007.
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