Mastering China's long game

A NEWLY designated Special Economic Zone, it buzzed with the anxious energy of a nation just cracking open its doors to the world.

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Yet, it was a provincial backwater, a port city where the entirety of its international trade aspirations rested on the shoulders of just two aging gantry cranes.

Facing a chorus of competing advice — some urging the blind imitation of Singapore’s development model, others paralysed by pessimism - the city’s new vice mayor, 32-year-old Xi Jinping, resisted the temptation of easy answers and short-term fixes.

It was his first posting in a coastal region and first time managing the complex machinery of a modernising city. Rather than improvising, he called for a blueprint. Not a makeshift plan designed simply for his term of office, but a generational strategic vision stretching 15 years, to the dawn of 21st century - the year 2000.

It was a move of radical foresight. “We cannot focus solely on the immediate,’ he later warned his colleagues, arguing that reactive governance would lead to confusion and a loss of direction.

The resulting document, the 1985-2000 Xiamen Economic and Social Development Strategy, made an audacious claim. It predicted that the world’s economic centre of gravity would inevitably shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and that Xiamen, with its deep-water port, was perfectly positioned to become a pivotal hub linking China to rest of the burgeoning Asia-Pacific economy.