SHANGHAI, 14 August 2003 — Shanghai plans to dismantle a 130-year-old shipyard and spend about 30 billion yuan ($3.6 billion) building the world’s largest, shipping officials said yesterday.
The China State Shipbuilding Corp. (CSSC), the state giant that runs the venerable Jiangnan yard, inked a pact with the eastern city in July to build a new yard along an eight-km stretch of the Yangtze.
When completed, the Changxing Island shipyard should be able to assemble a total dead-weight tonnage each year of eight million tons, said Guo Xiwen, the CSSC director in charge of the project.
“We’re looking at a time frame of eight to 10 years, but by 2010 we’ll finish the main portion,” he told Reuters.
The completed Changxing base will allow Shanghai to quadruple its shipbuilding capacity to a dead-weight tonnage of 12 million tons a year by 2015, CSSC general manager Chen Xiaojin was quoted as saying in a statement.
Twelve million tons would just surpass the capacity of Ulsan, South Korea, currently the world’s largest shipyard, Guo said. China’s ship-making industry, the world’s third largest and concentrated in the country’s booming commercial stronghold, has bounded in recent years, backed by dynamic growth in exports and a galloping economy.
Mainland shipyards have been threatening the leading positions of South Korea and Japan as the world’s top two ship builders, analysts say. The country now commands 8.3 percent of the global shipbuilding market, according to CSSC.
The city — which makes about half the country’s ships — plans to shift much of its ship-making industry to the banks of the Yangtze, which boasts a water depth of more than 10 metres — ideal for larger vessels.
The Jiangnan shipyard, first established in 1865 according to the Xinhua News Agency, is making way for a project to redevelop the Huangpu waterfront ahead of the 2010 World Expo.
“The relocation plan hasn’t been worked out fully,” Zeng Ming, a shipyard official, told Reuters. “We won’t halt all production in the old shipyard until the new one is finished.”
Meanwhile, in a bid to show it is living up to its WTO obligations, China has pulverized 42 million smuggled and pirated CDs and DVDs, state media reported yesterday. The discs were destroyed across the country Monday in what was termed the largest ever crackdown on illegal audio and video CDs and DVDs.
The city of Shanwei in southern Guangdong province was the main site of the destruction, with 26 million discs crushed. Shanwei and its neighboring city of Shantou are a favorite of smugglers attracted by the 298 kilometers of coastline in the area.
The crackdown was jointly organized by the General Administration of Customs, the General Administration of Press and Publication and the National Office for Cracking Down on Pornography and Piracy, the China Daily said.
“It is the biggest of its kind in terms of the quantity destroyed in one place and the overall quantity destroyed across China,” said Gui Xiaofeng from the General Administration of Press and Publication. The discs had been seized in raids dating back to 2001.
Part of China’s obligation to the World Trade Organization and its integration into global commerce is that overseas intellectual property rights have to be better protected.
Yet despite the public destruction of the discs, piracy and other infringements of intellectual property rights remain rampant, with not just fake music and videodiscs readily available but all manner of brand-named goods.
They are often produced with the connivance of local authorities. The China Daily said smugglers are now able to conceal more than four million discs on a single ship, compared to no more than one million a decade ago. In the latest major case, Guangdong police confiscated 4.77 million smuggled discs on March 2 — a record-breaking haul.
In another development, British oil giant BP and China’s Sinopec are awaiting government approval of a $260 million gas station joint venture in the eastern province of Zhejiang, state press reported yesterday. The two petrochemical groups will renovate and build 150 gas stations annually in Ningbo, Hangzhou and Shaoxing in Zhejiang, with plans to expand the network to 500 stations within three years of operation, the Shanghai Daily reported, citing officials with both companies.
Sinopec will own 60 percent of the new company, BP-Sinopec Zhejiang Oil Company, the reports said.
“We are optimistic about obtaining the approval to set up the joint venture quite soon,” the newspaper quoted BP China official Zhang Yuanheng as saying.
China’s gas retail market is scheduled to be open to foreign investors by the end of this year as stipulated under the country’s commitments to the World Trade Organization. BP set up a gas station joint venture with PetroChina in 2001 in southern Guangdong province, which is currently taking over the management of 366 gas stations originally under PetroChina.
