Stringent ecological standards paying off for high-tech zone

The Nanchang National High-tech Industrial Development Zone in Jiangxi province is finding success wooing investors with its sound ecology.

The zone is seeing an increasing number of major domestic and international companies because of its clean natural landscapes, such as its two large bodies of water, Aixi Lake and Yaohu Lake.

Through strict implementation of environmental protection standards, it has built wetland parks and kept green belts around the lakes to improve the local ecology. It has also ushered in environmentally friendly enterprises to strike a balance between industries, urban development and nature.

Twenty years ago, a 200-hectare tract was constructed to the east of Anxi Lake and opened for development by real estate companies. Officials from the Nanchang high-tech zone said they could have pocketed 5 billion yuan ($772 million) in revenue from the sales of the land or several billion yuan from industrial output.

After weighing the pros and cons, the zone walked away from the industrial projects and built a wetland park, which has now become a "green lung" of the city and home to more than 100 species of birds, including wild geese, swans and great crested grebes, which are under State protection.

"I've been to many State-level high-tech industrial development zones and the ecological buildup of the Nanchang zone is the best," said Xu Kaibo, president of Bertelsmann Arvato (China), a technology subsidiary of German media giant Bertelsmann.

From its outset, Nanchang has stuck to the principle of prioritizing environmental protection. That strategy has paid off. The land value in the wetland area has risen by more than 10 times from 20 years ago and a number of major companies, such as Bertelsmann, ABB, China Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Group, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation), the Greenland Group, and have set up branches around the lake.

In developing the much larger, 20-square-kilometer Yaohu Lake area, the Nanchang high-tech zone divided it into four parts depending on their distance to the center of the lake area, including a forest park; an area designed for accommodating research institutions, corporate headquarters and industrial parks; another area designed for building business-related facilities, apartments for professionals, and a sports center; and lastly an area on the lake's periphery that will be the home for high-tech industries, such as optoelectronics, new materials, biomedicine, aviation manufacturing and software outsourcing.

The peripheral area is home to a number of major domestic and international companies, including Fortune Global 500 companies.

The attractiveness of the zone has come from the relentless efforts of the Nanchang authorities in improving the city's ecology over the years.

In the Yaohu Lake area, farmers used to raise fish and ducks, leading to discharge of sewage into the lake.

To restore the area's environment, the local government strictly raised standards for raising fish and ducks in the lake, banned the discharge of sewage and cleaned up water channels into the lake to improve the quality of the water in the lake.

The zone invested 1 billion yuan in building the Yaohu Lake Forest Park.

(China Daily 12/25/2015 page5)