The global economic crisis triggered by the Lehman Brothers fiasco has left China with an opportunity to pursue further sophistication of its industrial structure from labor-intensive to a more technology- and capital-intensive model, a Chinese official said Wednesday in Tokyo.
"We are calling on manufacturing businesses, domestic or foreign, to add new value to their products and to exploit (China's) domestic markets," said Jiang Ling, vice mayor of the industrial city of Dongguan, Guangzhou Province.
He said that in the same context, China welcomes foreign investment in such new areas as environmental technology, energy conservation and solar power utilization, as well as services including physical distribution.
Dongguan is a prefecture-level industrial city in central Guangdong.
Located in the Pearl River Delta, Dongguan borders the provincial capital of Guangzhou to the north and Shenzhen to the south.
According to Ling, his city felt much harsher repercussions from the global recession than other industrial centers in China due to its heavy reliance on export-oriented manufacturing industries.
The city of Dongguan depends on foreign-affiliated business for 90 percent of its aggregate industrial output and 50 percent of its gross domestic product, Ling explained.
"However, the city's economy finally began to pick up in the second quarter of this year and posted (better than) 3 percent growth in the third quarter, although the growth rate is still low," Ling said.
"Like Japan in the 1980s, our city's economy now faces a challenge of structural adjustment from one reliant heavily on manufacturing industries. We must carry through this structural reform to ensure future growth," the vice mayor said.
