"Tiny airport brings world to isolated small Chinese town"

Monday, July 12, 2004

Tiny airport brings world to isolated small Chinese town
A mile of highway will take you a mile, a mile of runway can take you
anywhere
The Associated Press 


WUHAI, China -- Before the little building rose, everything was simpler.
Outsiders pretty much stayed out. Insiders traded with each other.
Miners mined coal. Desert winds blew, nomads wandered, lonely lakes
froze and thawed, and the town called Wuhai went about its business. 

Which wasn't very much business at all. 

Sixteen hours from Beijing -- and that was by train. A car trip through
Inner Mongolia's grasslands and cracked desert could be even longer.
Wuhai felt isolated: China was modernizing, city by city, and it was
hard for this place to be heard in the din. 

"There really weren't that many ways to get to Wuhai," says Jiang Jun,
who works for the city's Foreign Affairs Office. 

That all changed one chilly day last December on a patch of land eight
miles east of town when Wuhai threw its runway open for business. The
thrice-weekly Hainan Airlines Flight HU857 from Beijing -- a 27-seat
Dornier that bounces alarmingly in the wind -- touched down and
disgorged a planeload of visitors, businessmen and potential investors
who could connect Wuhai to the outside. 

Suddenly, the long-overlooked Mongolian coal town and its 420,000 people
-- a tiny city by Chinese standards -- were right on message for modern
China's market-economy ambitions: Bring in money and entrepreneurs. Hook
up to the world. Help build the well-off society that the new leaders in
Beijing demand. 

"We'll be bigger. We'll be more dynamic," says Wang Jiaqi, who lives in
Xingdi, a village barely a mile from the end of the runway. "I can
understand why not many people have come. But now they can." 

Adds the village leader, Feng Shiming: "Before we become part of this
globalized world, we have to be able to get to it." 

These days, a drive around Wuhai reveals a place poised to happen. Its
freshly paved central plaza features a flagpole but no flag. Buildings
by the dozen, including a convention center, are rising. Businessmen
cluster at neon-saturated restaurants and scarf mutton dishes, mobile
phones at their elbows. "Serve the local economy," says a government
propaganda sign on a building. 

But serving the local economy, and bringing the world in, aren't always
easy in Chinese towns. 

Unlike the United States or Europe, much of China's countryside -- where
800 million of its citizens live -- lacks paved highways. Though the
government is hurrying to build more, expressways often taper off into
two lanes at the edge of town, and entire regions are still connected by
dirt roads. 

At the same time, fierce competition among regions and aggressive local
protectionism means communities are scratching for any advantages that
can attract investors. One northeastern city, Suifenhe, is hurrying to
upgrade its port facilities and connect its roads to the outside world.
Others are working to step up trade with Russia and North Korea. 

Healthy trade is difficult, though, if there's no way to get here from
there -- particularly from the cash-laden business centers of China's
eastern seaboard. It takes airplanes. 

More than 2,000 new people came in and out of Wuhai during the first
three months of the airport's operation -- hardly an explosion of trade.
Gate 2 sits unused, but this summer flights are being inaugurated to two
nearby cities, Xi'an and Lanzhou, which authorities expect will double
Wuhai's traffic.


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