Building the nation

摘要

Its economy shows few signs of needing one, but China is revving up what officials call a "new engine of growth" to supplement the dynamos of Shanghai and Shenzhen, the two port cities at the forefront of the country's economic transformation. A strip of industrial sprawl and barren semi-wasteland that stretches for 150km (90 miles) along the northern coast is being turned into a development zone far bigger than either Shanghai's or Shenzhen's. And its planners have been given the central government's blessing to experiment with a wide range of economic and bureaucratic reforms.