Tianjin, north China’s biggest port city, will raise its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) to 8,000 U.S. dollars by 2011, the municipal Party Chief Zhang Gaoli pledged at the Ninth Tianjin Party Congress, which opened on Tuesday.
In the next five years, Tianjin would strive to become the economic hub of north China, Zhang told the Ninth Tianjin Municipal Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
Its GDP was expected to reach 800 billion yuan and income would exceed 200 billion yuan by 2011. In the meantime, its energy consumption per unit of GDP would be cut by 20 percent.
Tianjin, with a population of more than 10 million, is one of the four municipalities directly under the central government. In 2006, its per capita GDP reached 5,000 dollars.
Zhang said development of the Binhai New Area would be the focus of the city’s economic growth.
“Binhai will be a window for the opening-up in north China. It will become an important manufacturing and research and development base, as well as a shipping and logistics center in the country’s north,” Zhang said in his report.
In 2006, the government began to turn Binhai New Area into its third economic engine following Shenzhen and Shanghai‘s Pudong, the economic powerhouses of the country’s southern and eastern coastal areas.
The area, situated 120 km southeast of Beijing and covering 2,270 sq km, generated 196 billion yuan in GDP in 2006, or 45 percent of the city’s total.
The government has since launched a series of measures to facilitate Binhai’s development, including reforms of government administration, corporate administration and in the fields of science and technology, land use and foreign-related businesses.
(Source: en.beijing2008.cn)
