By Xie Weiqun, People’s Daily
The Lin-gang Special Area of China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone has recently begun “rush hours” of project construction.
Thirty-one projects there were completed on Aug. 16, and 42 new ones were signed on the next day. On Aug. 18, 24 projects of the third quarter commenced, marking a new wave of construction.
Recently, 15 enterprises have signed to move in an industrial park specializing in marine and smart manufacturing industries in the Lin-gang Special Area. The total investment of these enterprises exceeded two billion yuan ($309.5 million), and the total value of output is expected to hit 8 billion yuan.
The industrial park will have a property area of a million square meters and revenue of 30 billion yuan by 2025, and be built into a 100-billion-yuan estate with world-class ecology for the blue economy 10 years later.
Eyeing on frontier technologies, the Lin-gang Special Area is growing into a new source of growth featuring high-quality development. It will center on four core industries of integrated circuit, biological medicine, civil aviation and artificial intelligence, two advantageous industries of smart new energy vehicle and high-end equipment manufacturing, as well as two future industries of green remanufacturing and hydrogen energy.
The development of the whole industrial chain of the Lin-gang Special Area came from the individual breakthroughs made by all business entities doing business there, said Wu Xiaohua, deputy secretary of the Working Committee of the Communist Party of China Lin-gang Special Area Committee.
Statistics showed that 765 projects were signed in the Lin-gang Special Area over the past two years with a total investment of 447.83 billion yuan. 40,329 enterprises were set up there during the same period, increasing 53.7 percent yearly on average, and registered capital surged 218.5 percent each year on average, reaching 674.2 billion yuan.
Gathering new momentum and seeing rapid industrial development, the Lin-gang Special Area is serving as a new source of growth and engine for Shanghai’s economic development.
In August 2019, China issued an overall plan for the Lin-gang Special Area of China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone, proposing to advance trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, including the free flow of investment, trade, capital, transportation and employment.
Over the past two years, the Lin-gang Special Area has constantly upgraded its business environment and optimized public services, continuously shattering the record of project signing and implementation.
Last year, the Lin-gang Special Area established an approval and review center for investment projects, and this year, it further accelerated its approval services, striving for immediate project commencement on land approval and immediate production on project completion.
Besides, the Lin-gang Special Area has exempted enterprises’ engineering costs in water, power and natural gas supplies. As of July this year, over one billion yuan of such engineering cost had been saved for 63 projects.
For finance, trade, integrated circuit and artificial intelligence enterprises in the Lin-gang Special Area, faster international exchanges of data means stronger competitiveness. The Lin-gang Special Area has built a dedicated data link that directly connects its industrial parks to the International Communication Service Import and Export Bureau to improve internet access quality and experience of enterprise users. As of June this year, nine enterprises had applied for 11 such data links, six of which have been completed.
While improving infrastructure services and upgrading business environment, the Lin-gang Special Area is also advancing garden city construction and striving to achieve waste-free and low-carbon development, so as to build a high-quality, integrated and sustainable ecological environment system.
