CHINA’S SUPERCITY POLICY KEEPS EX-PROVINCIAL CAPITAL WAITING FOR REVIVAL

[Until now, Baoding had been a fairly typical third-tier city in China’s interior, its downtown a jumble of small shops, chaotic streets and restaurants serving donkey burgers, a local specialty. Its main distinctions were having the most polluted air in China, and losing its status as the provincial capital during a bizarre power struggle in Maoist China.]

By Ian Johnson

A villager covered the grain she dried on an empty road on the

outskirts of Baoding, China, in June. Credit Adam Dean

for The New York Times

BAODING, China — The famed clothing market’s vast new home is ready for business.

Hulking new buildings that will house vendors selling furs from Inner Mongolia, cashmere from Tibet and textiles from the coast look like spaceships that have landed in the surrounding corn and millet fields. One structure is a half-mile by a half-mile square, covered in granite and decorated with flying buttresses. Another disappears into the horizon, surrounded by ramps so that delivery trucks can drive up to the back of every shop on each floor.

The buildings lie empty, but planners say they are the first steps in the latest effort to modernize Baoding, a city of about one million southwest of Beijing.

Baoding has also signed over two high-rises to a company that runs the Zhongguancun high-tech district in Beijing in a bid to fill it with tech firms. A high-speed rail line from Tianjin that runs near the market is expected to open this year. And a few years ago, the city created an industrial park for companies that produce solar panels.

Until now, Baoding had been a fairly typical third-tier city in China’s interior, its downtown a jumble of small shops, chaotic streets and restaurants serving donkey burgers, a local specialty. Its main distinctions were having the most polluted air in China, and losing its status as the provincial capital during a bizarre power struggle in Maoist China.

But now it hopes for a different image: that of a prosperous satellite city, part of a new supercity of 130 million that will give poorer North China the sort of economic locomotives that have powered central and southern China along the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas.

Called Jing-Jin-Ji after its three key centers — “Jing” is for Beijing, “Jin” is for the port city of Tianjin, and “Ji” is the traditional name for Hebei Province — it aims to move away from the kind of dirty industries common in Hebei and toward the information industries found in Beijing.

“This is a chance for Baoding to recapture some of its former importance,” said Sun Jinzhu, the city’s official historian. “This is a historic opportunity for us and for the rest of Hebei.”

But transforming Baoding will be a challenge. The region is relatively poor, with few natural economic advantages beyond coal mining. That has led to the development of the world’s biggest concentration of heavily polluting coking and steel factories. Even though Baoding itself has no heavy industries, pollution from nearby cities has given it the worst air in China.

The risks of such down-market economic development are also apparent in nearby Tianjin, which became a center for dirty chemical industriesrejected in many other parts of China. Last month, a massive chemical firedestroyed part of Tianjin’s Binhai New Area port, one of the pillars of the Jing-Jin-Ji plan.

The effort to redeem Baoding has echoes in the past. It was once the capital of Zhili Province, made up of today’s Hebei Province and Tianjin. A key military and political stronghold in imperial China, Baoding was famed for its dates, persimmons and sesame oil. (The donkey burgers came later.) But this agricultural focus did not sit well with the Communists, who took power in 1949 and favored heavy industry.

  “They said that Baoding couldn’t be the provincial capital because it had no industry,” Mr. Sun said.

The capital was moved to Tianjin in 1958, but eight years later the large port city was carved out of Hebei Province and became an independent city-state like Beijing or Shanghai. The capital of Hebei returned to Baoding in 1966.

That year, Mao and his left-wing allies began the Cultural Revolution. Improbably, the issue of Hebei’s capital resurfaced as a national issue. Leftists said another Hebei city, Shijiazhuang, should be the capital because it had more heavy industry and was closer to a mountain range, which might be useful in case China had to fight another guerrilla war. Mao agreed, and in 1968 the provincial capital moved to Shijiazhuang. Baoding was again sidelined.

Now, planners hope to fix Baoding’s economic deficits by fiat. Their solution is to use infrastructure and powerful administrative structures to push industry out of Beijing and into surrounding cities like Baoding. A key step came in May when China’s cabinet, the State Council, approved Baoding’s expansion from 120 square miles to 850 square miles, or nearly three times the size of New York City.

When the issue of expansion was raised last year, it caused an increase in Baoding’s real estate prices, with speculators hoping that the government would move some ministries or bureaus here.

It did not, but Beijing pledged to move its famous wholesale clothing market, which used to be in Dahongmen, to Baoding. The idea is that land is cheaper in Baoding, and that a high-speed rail running at about 200 miles an hour can make Baoding, 100 miles from Beijing, reachable in half an hour.

So far the infrastructure is in place, but other progress is stalled. A new home for the Dahongmen market has been built in Baoding’s suburb of Baigou, but only a few stores are open. Retailers said they had moved only because their stalls in Beijing had been torn down and Baoding was their hometown.

 “It’s a long-term trend, but it’s slow,” said Wang Shushong, a local women’s clothing vendor. “If you don’t need to move here, you won’t.”

The few vendors who were there said they had received rent-free leases for the first year.

“It’s definitely going to happen, but for people right at the start, it’s difficult,” said Zhu Yiming, a distributor who buys clothing from southern Chinese factories and sells them to northern Chinese and Russian buyers. “The problem is people still want to be in Beijing.”

The Zhongguancun technology center is also empty, but the senior project manager, Zhang Shuguang, said he was confident that he could attract companies interested in clean energy. “This can be a base to further develop these future-oriented industries,” he said.

“Cities like Baoding have contributed much to Beijing over the years, so now Beijing can pay them back,” Mr. Zhang said.

More skeptical are local economists, like Deng Zhengxin of Hebei University in Baoding. Mr. Deng said the urban conglomerates along the Yangtze and Pearl Rivers had grown up naturally because their key cities — Shanghai on the Yangtze and Guangzhou-Shenzhen on the Pearl River — were industrial and trading powerhouses that had an economic need to move businesses out of their urban centers and into the hinterlands. That process created the two delta regions that today account for nearly 40 percent of China’s economic output.

What is lacking in North China, however, is a similar economic center. Beijing is a locus of political and cultural power, leaving few opportunities for cities like Baoding to benefit from the new supercity policy.

“What does Beijing have to give Baoding?” Mr. Deng said. “Its main product is politics. How do you share that with other cities?”

Adam Wu contributed research from Baoding.

@ The New York Times