China’s Go West plan fails to capture imagination of foreign firms suffering from ‘regional development plan fatigue’
- Foreign firms unconvinced by China’s latest efforts to revitalise its 12 underdeveloped western local economies
- Beijing urged to focus on ‘long-term factors, not short-term subsidies and tax deferrals’, while Xinjiang human rights issues could also act as a deterrent
This is the third story in a three-part series examining the Chinese government’s new Go West plan to develop the central and western regions of the country in response to growing challenges in the international environment. You can read the first and second stories in the series here.
China’s latest blueprint to stimulate its western provincial economies has been met with a collective shrug of the shoulder from foreign firms, many of which are suffering from “regional development plan fatigue”.
A slew of infrastructure projects will also seek to tick off political objectives, such as strengthening China’s western borders, at a time when it is engaged in territorial skirmishes with India in the Himalayas, and also as it continues to aggressively push its Belt and Road Initiative in Central and South Asia.
Unless you follow these issues really closely it is hard to understand what differentiates them from any of the other development initiatives that have come before, a lot of which has been very disappointing
“The strategic importance of the western regions was elevated after Covid-19. China wants to strengthen its influence in Central, Western and Southeast Asia for national security reasons and to protect China’s central position in global supply chains,” said Dan Wang, an analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit in Beijing.