Beijing’s controversial ‘Made in China 2025’ plan is a linchpin of Northeastern rust belt’s future
- Liaoning province, the rust belt’s biggest economy, is pinning its hopes on the industrial strategy to use technology to transform its lumbering industries
- The plan which uses government subsidies to help firms cut reliance on foreign technology and imports has become a political flashpoint for the US-China trade war
While Beijing may be keeping its controversial “Made in China 2025” industrial strategy away from public discussion, the state-driven plan to lift Chinese manufacturing up the value chain is the bedrock of economic revitalisation in Liaoning, one of the three provinces of China's Northeastern rust belt.
The four-year-old plan that aims to wean China off its reliance on foreign technology and imports, and build global hi-tech champions, has become a political flashpoint for the US-China trade war.
Beijing’s pledge to subsidise state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and acquire intellectual property to turn China into a tech superpower at the expense of US and foreign firms are among the issues that have obstructed progress in the trade negotiations between the world’s two biggest economies.
But even as the central government has downplayed those intentions in the past year and emphasised the importance of cooperating with foreign investors to develop advanced technologies, Liaoning has held on to Made in China 2025 as the blueprint for transforming inefficient SOEs – predominantly in traditional heavy industries such as ship building, steel making and coal mining – into companies that can not only dominate the domestic market but also global competition.
The showcase of that effort is the Sino-German Hi-tech Park in Liaoning’s capital city of Shenyang .
