Speaking of Wenzhou, what is the first impression of the average person? There are many local tycoons, such as speculative housing groups all over the country and Wenzhou business gangs running around the country. Oh, and the divine comedy "Jiangnan Tannery Closed Down".
In the 14th Five-Year Plan of Zhejiang, the strategy of developing the three core cities of Hangzhou, Yongzhou and Wenzhou was put forward. Wenzhou, together with the provincial capitals of Hangzhou and Ningbo, forms the "iron triangle" of Zhejiang's economy. According to the GDP ranking of Zhejiang Province in the first three quarters of 2021, Wenzhou also ranked third in Zhejiang Province with 550.2 billion yuan. Although far from the Yangtze River Delta and not receiving enough economic radiation from Shanghai, the city of Wenzhou has always had a special place on China's commercial map.
But compared with Hangzhou and Ningbo, which have long become trillion cities, Wenzhou has been spat at most by poor urban interfaces, inflated housing prices, unconsciously lost population, and the economy that has begun to fall into loneliness in 2004. In 2016, financial commentator Ye Tan published an article entitled "Ten Most Promising Cities in China in My Eyes", "naming" Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, as one of the "most unpromising cities" in China, and in the past decade, the glory of local tycoon cities seems to have begun to fade slowly.
In the economically developed Zhejiang, Ningbo and Ningbo have become trillion cities, why is Wenzhou's development lacking in stamina? Is it population loss or economic structure? Are there any new development opportunities in Wenzhou in the future?
The average annual GDP growth rate is 14.1%, which is 0.6% higher than the Zhejiang average. The Wenzhou economy before 2004 created more than just brilliance, and the economist Fei Xiaotong even summed up the success of Wenzhou's economy as a Wenzhou model.
In the 1980s, Wenzhou formed a manufacturing industry with shoes and clothing, electrical appliances, auto parts, pumps and valves as the pillars. A prefecture-level city has 33 "national" professional industrial bases such as "China's Electrical Appliance Capital, China's Shoe Capital, and China's Automobile and Motorcycle Parts Capital". Throughout the 80s and 90s in China, daily necessities and light industry could hardly be separated from Wenzhou manufacturing. In the 1990s, Wenzhou garments occupied half of the domestic market. Among them, annunciation bird, Metersbonwe, Semir and other brands still have a place in the national clothing market.
The same is the private economy, what is the difference between the Wenzhou model and the successful model of other regional economies? In the early stage of reform and opening up, the collective economy represented by Su Xichang of Jiangsu province mainly supported large-scale industrial production, while the Pearl River Delta, which is backed by Hong Kong and Macao, took advantage of its location to develop foreign trade and processing industries.
Wenzhou has chosen a different development path, in the product category to the daily use of small commodities, the main development of light industry, the business unit is the family, joint household contracting, the most important thing is the local government's inaction strategy for the private economy, whether for the private economy or credit activities, almost adopted a "stocking" attitude. Through these loose policies, Wenzhou, which dared to fight during that time, turned all its geographical disadvantages into advantages.
However, Wenzhou's economic glory came to an abrupt end in 2004. From 2004 to 2012, Wenzhou's GDP growth slowed down to 10.5%, once falling to the bottom of Zhejiang. At the same time, Wenzhou manufacturing has also begun to encounter counterfeit and inferior questions, in addition, industrial transformation lags behind, innovation growth weakens, serious hollowing out of enterprises and other issues are becoming increasingly prominent. It was also during this period that a large number of Wenzhou businessmen chose to leave Wenzhou, and a large amount of funds, including foreign investment and financial lending, were invested throughout the country. According to media statistics in the past 10 years, the cumulative foreign investment of local industrial enterprises and relocated enterprises in Wenzhou has exceeded 100 billion yuan, and the downturn in the real economy has become an unavoidable fact. The 2011 private financial crisis dealt another heavy blow to Wenzhou's economy, and some commentators believed that the overall impact of the credit crisis outside the financial system on Wenzhou's economy continued until 2017.
In addition, the development disadvantages of small-scale enterprises have gradually been reflected over time, according to statistics, the average life expectancy of Wenzhou enterprises is only 4 years, the ability to resist risks is poor, and the elimination rate is high. As of 2019, there are 132 listed companies in Hangzhou, 76 in Ningbo, and only 21 in Wenzhou, ranking eighth in Zhejiang Province. In the era when capital determines the strength of enterprises, Wenzhou's enterprise development model is obviously lagging behind. The labor-intensive manufacturing in Wenzhou has also begun to slowly move away from the core area of China's economy because of the lack of core competitiveness and the lack of high-tech enterprises.
In addition to GDP, the most reflective of changes in the status of cities in a period of time is probably the flow of people. Now I have to ask which city in Zhejiang Province has the most population? Most people will say in unison that it is the provincial capital of Hangzhou. According to the results of the seventh census, Hangzhou has a population of 11.94 million, ranking first in Zhejiang and the only city in Zhejiang province with a population of more than 10 million.
In fact, Hangzhou's population advantage has not been maintained for a long time, before 2016, Wenzhou has been ranked first in the population of zhejiang provinces with a population of more than 9 million. But in the past decade, Hangzhou's population has increased by more than 3 million, Wenzhou has only increased by 450,000, and Wenzhou's population growth in the past decade has been only 4.93%. It ranks second from the bottom among the eleven prefecture-level cities in Zhejiang, only higher than Zhoushan, which has a population of more than 1 million.
In the impression of many people, Wenzhou people pay attention to blood relatives and group development, and prefer to leave their hometown or even go abroad to develop. Around 2016, when the population of Hangzhou and Wenzhou was poor in scissors, it was the time for the rise of various emerging industries in the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta urban circle. In the face of various industrial transformation and upgrading brought about by the Internet, not only the foreign population, but also the willingness of Wenzhou people to stay in the local area has gradually decreased. According to a mobile phone big data released by the media, in 2017, Wenzhou Mobile big data identified 7.2 million Wenzhou nationals, of which 2.46 million people developed in other places. In the province, Wenzhou people who go out love Hangyong the most, and outside the province is Guangdong. In addition, Hangzhou's population big data also shows that as of 2018, a total of 337,000 Wenzhounese lived in Hangzhou, and the average age of these Wenzhounese was only 32.5 years old, which was lower than the average age of Wenzhou people in the city of 43.0 years.
In addition to population, Wenzhou is most criticized by the outside world for its backward urban infrastructure construction and chaotic urban planning. When evaluating Wenzhou, Ye Tan said: Wenzhou city lacks planning, infrastructure is not very good, and the city lacks the self-organization ability of planning and development. Although since then, the Wenzhou Business Daily has refuted the reasons planned by Wenzhou City to upgrade the urban roads, build 3 urban railways, and expand Wenzhou Airport as a regional aviation hub port. But a closer look at Wenzhou's urban construction reveals that only one subway has been built and an inner ring road has just been formed, showing the gap between urban construction and other Chinese cities.
Of course, if we want to talk about some objective factors, Wenzhou's backward municipal construction is more or less related to its unique urban topography. Wenzhou's urban area was originally very small, with only one municipal district in Lucheng District. After the expansion of the urban area in the 1980s, Longwan, Ouhai and other districts were developed, but if you calculate the total area of Wenzhou, it is actually only 1288 square kilometers. This area is only equivalent to the size of the two districts of Haishu and Beilun in Ningbo. If placed in Jiangsu Province, it is only about the same size as Wujiang District in Suzhou. What's worse is that from the map, the urban area of Wenzhou is stuck in a narrow strip of land between the two banks of the Ou River and the Yandang Mountains, and the narrowest place is less than 30 kilometers. So much so that the expansion of Wenzhou's urban area needed to expand eastward to the dongtou of an island.
Night view of Wenzhou World Trade Center Building
Compared with the Pingchuan River in the Hangjia Lake Plain, with the departure of labor-intensive industries, Wenzhou's disadvantage of having more people and less land for many years has become increasingly prominent. Therefore, in the development and utilization of land, Wenzhou has to adopt an intensive strategy, and many new areas under construction have also chosen the construction plan of high-rise or even super-high-rise buildings. In recent years, high-rise commercial buildings represented by the Wenzhou World Trade Center Tower have risen on both sides of the Oujiang River, but the most direct test of the overly scattered skyscraper construction plan for Wenzhou is that each super high-rise needs a lot of resources to maintain from construction to operation. Similar to the inflated residential commercial housing in Wenzhou, if there is no urban industrial upgrading and the development of surrounding commerce in the future, their symbolic significance will be greater than the reality.
In 2020, the total GDP will return to the top 30 in the country. Perhaps the beginning of Wenzhou's economic recovery. The goal is to build an "iron triangle" in Zhejiang together with Hangzhou and Ningbo, and regaining confidence is the keyword that appears most in the Media of Wenzhou. In fact, Wenzhou's developed light industry and strong private wealth capital, if it can continue to conform to the law of industrial change and the change of demand structure, Wenzhou's private enterprises still have the potential for large-scale development.
In terms of urban construction, in November this year, the news of urban expansion came out of Wenzhou. In the next few years, Wenzhou's Ruian City will definitely withdraw from the city and set up districts, and the whole will be merged into the main urban area of Wenzhou. At the same time, Cangnan County and Pingyang County in the south are also expected to withdraw from the county and establish a city, and join the embrace of the Greater Wenzhou City together with Longgang in the next decade, when the area of the Wenzhou Urban Area will also have the opportunity to expand more than three times.
Today's Wenzhou also has natural advantages such as population size, natural ecology, and economic strength. Yueqing and Ruian, two county-level cities with a total GDP of more than 100 billion yuan, are among the top 100 counties in China. Finally, the business spirit of Wenzhou people who dare to break through and take risks may also be a unique advantage for Wenzhou city to catch up in the future.
Resources
1. Zhejiang Daily, "Wenzhou has long occupied the first place in the province, why did it lose to Hangzhou?" 》
2. Jiuge Finance "Wenzhou: 30 Years of Turmoil, 10 Years of Loneliness"
3. Zhejiang News "Why is the "Wenzhou Crisis" explaining the vitality of the "Wenzhou Model"? 》
4. The Paper's "Controversy in which Ye Tan listed the "Top Ten Most Promising Cities", wenzhou media published articles accusing it of arbitrariness"