8
the center of consumer manufacture and much of China’s high-end heavy industry during
the 1950’s and 1960’s.
30
The Central Coast has historically been one of China’s richest
regions and contains many of the largest and most important centers of trade and
commerce, as well as most ports of entry, in the country.
The Upper Changjiang region long contained many important commercial centers
along the Yangzi river and its tributaries, but developed industries – mostly in defense-
related sectors and textiles, but also in mining, steel, machine building, and some light
manufacture – in two relatively recent spurts: in the 1930’s and 40’s as the location of the
Nationalist Government’s wartime capital and with the building of the Beijing-
Guangzhou railroad, and then again in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as the focus of the
CCP’s “Third Front” (San Xian) policy to build up defense-related industrial capacity in
regions shielded from attack by either the US (by sea) or the USSR (overland from the
North). The river systems of the Upper Changjiang provide a good transportation
network within the region, and create important bottlenecks that became commercial
centers, and some parts of the region are also traversed by major rail lines. Other parts of
the region are quite far off the main rail corridors, however, making overall transportation
access somewhat uneven in the region as a whole. Markets and informal trade have long
flourished in the Upper Changjiang.
Provincial capitals, as showcase cities within their provinces, most often contain
the widest possible mix of sectors that could be supported by a province’s resource base
or coaxed out of planners. They also tend to have the most technically advanced and
and “international settlements”. Of these, France, Germany, Russia, Portugal, Japan, and the United
Kingdom were the most heavily involved and invested.
30
Gang Tian “Shanghai’s Role in the Economic Development of China: Reform of Foreign Trade and
Investment” Westport: Praeger, 1996 – ch.2; Xiaowen Tian “China’s Regional Economic Disparities since
Convention