China's Domestic Economic Belt

Less well known on the world stage than China's land and sea "One Belt, One Road" and "Maritime Silk Road" is China's Domestic Economic Belt along the Yangtze River from densely-populated and heavily-polluted Shanghai, west to the lake region around Wuhan (where COVID-19 originated), and still farther southwest to Chongqing, population over 30 million, larger than Shanghai and Beijing (home to OneSpace, China's solid-fueled commercial spacecraft industry, specializing in launching small satellites) and Chengdu, where police just raided an underground church about to commemorate the June, 1989 democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square. (This is an opportunity for students to trace the Yangtze River on a map of China.)

Attention to ecology along this Yangtze River route is a priority in China. It entails:

•  Closing polluting chemical plants
•  Restoration of lakes and wetlands 
• Sewage treatment 
• Regulating the fishing industry
• Developing clean air technology (See earlier post,"How to Meet the Clean Air Challenge.")
• Integrating non-polluting energy sources into the existing power grid'
• Building new eco-friendly communities (See earlier post, "Priority: Eliminate generating electricity from fossil fuels.")

A new project in China's far western reaches demonstrates Beijing's focus on developing non-polluting energy sources. Where the Yangtze is known as the Jinsha Jiang River, the new Lawa hydroelectric dam will generate two billion watts of power, the same energy supplied by the U.S. Hoover Dam, on the border between Sichuan and the Tibetan Plateau.

     Development along the Yangtze also indicates China's interest in technological progress.  Economic assistance is going to the Donghu New Technology Development Zone east of Wuhan. The zone houses the FiberHome Technology Group, an optic fiber communications center, and the Wuhan Xinxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. Producing memory chips for China's semiconductor industry has become a personal priority of President Xi Jinping.

The U.S. Commerce Department's April, 2018 7-year ban on sales of chips to ZTE, the high-tech firm in China's integrated circuit and Smartphone industry, exposed dependence on exports from Qualcomm in California. Once again the consequences of cheating played a part. False statements and missing export records showed ZTE violated a 2017 settlement by illegally using U.S. chips in telecommunications equipment shipped to Iran and North Korea. Although ZTE had settled the 2017 case by paying a $1.2 billion penalty and promising disciplinary actions against 39 employees involved in illegal conduct, ZTE took no personnel measures. To restore Qualcomm's sales to ZTE, the company agreed to install a new management team and to let the U.S. staff a compliance unit that would report to the U.S. Commerce Department for the next ten years. At first the US Congress still rejected the plan, until President Trump and Chinese President Xi reached a separate agreement. 

Violations of the original ZTE technology agreement and other cases of Chinese infringement on intellectual property rights concern the U.S. about China's interest in stealing chip research, development, and manufacturing know-how, not only how work in these areas is progressing at the zone in Donghu. With nearly 350,000 Chinese students in the United States, universities are warned to lock their labs, and legal interns from China are being kept away from sensitive antitrust cases. (See the post concerning Foxconn's intended facility in Wisconsin in the later post, "Unmask Inscrutable Chinese Intentions.")