I told my friend, an American who has lived in Beijing for many years, that I was going to Nanchang. "Oh," he said, "I´ve never been there. Let me know what it looks like. Actually, on second thoughts, maybe I can guess." He was right.
Nanchang is the capital of Jianxi province, about 375 miles (600 kilometres) south-west of Shanghai. I was visiting in the spring of 2007 in order to learn about a tractor factory which had been bought two years earlier from a state-owned automobile manufacturer, Jiangling Motors, by Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M), one of India´s biggest companies. The origin of the visit had been a lunch in Mumbai a month earlier with Anand Mahindra, M&M´s managing director, at which we discussed the potential for Indian firms to manufacture and sell in China. It turned out that M&M was already doing so, in what had been the first Indian joint venture factory in China (Jiangling still owns 20%), and had succeeded in revamping the Chinese tractor factory, in the country that everyone thinks of as today´s "workshop of the world", from being unproductive and loss-making into much better shape, using Indian management skills and the experience that comes from being India´s largest manufacturer of tractors. A story formed: India teaches China how to be a manufacturer.
It had been far from easy. The Chinese tractor market is a cut-throat affair, with prices for the sort of mid-size vehicle M&M makes at Nanchang roughly half that paid in India. Most of the firm´s competitors in China are state-owned enterprises or at least privatised SOEs, which are used to competing on price rather than quality or service. Typical profit margins are at best a third as high as those for tractor makers in India. Nevertheless, M&M has trebled output in Nanchang, while the number of workers required to make each tractor has been halved. As a result, the factory itself, which is just outside Nanchang, felt so spacious that it was almost empty. Lonely groups of machine tools were clustered at one side of a big, hangar-like factory shed; in another shed, the assembly line also looked surprisingly spacious. With the market for tractors booming thanks to tax reforms for farmers and new subsidies for machinery and seeds that were introduced from 2004 onwards—overall nationwide sales of tractors rose from 90,000 in 2004 to 200,000 in 2006—that space will no doubt soon be filled. It is a similar story in the city of Nanchang itself.
Nanchang is not well known outside China. But that is true of most Chinese cities. It does, however, have a noteworthy place in Communist Party history as on August 1st 1927 it was the scene of the first military uprising organised by the Communists, against the army of Chiang Kai-shek´s ruling Kuomintang party. The men in charge were later to play central roles in Mao Zedong´s 27-year reign: Zhou Enlai, as Mao´s prime minister, and Zhu De, as commander in chief of the Red Army and then the People´s Liberation Army. The uprising succeeded only for four days, however, and the mutineers had to flee, albeit with a force of 20,000 men. August 1st is nevertheless celebrated as being in effect the date on which the PLA was founded. According to Philip Short´s biography, "Mao: A life", in 1955 seven of the ten marshals of the PLA were veterans of the breakaway force at Nanchang.
The city does have a museum and a memorial statue to commemorate these events. Its main features, however, are of a sort much more typical of modern China: wide new streets, rows of skyscrapers and grand pieces of modern architecture have all sprung up in just the past couple of years, exactly as my American friend had expected. The fact that so many Chinese cities look the same is the result of decisions made by their municipal and provincial governments to sweep aside old houses and roads and to build new monuments to modernity.
Yet not everyone is happy about it. In June 2007 the vice-minister of construction in the central government, Qui Baoxing, publicly lamented the fact that China had become "a land of 1,000 identical cities", in a development boom that in his view had done even more damage to the country´s cultural heritage than Mao´s Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution that the Great Helmsman launched in 1966. Vice-Minister Qui said that too many local governments had engaged in a "blind pursuit of the large, the new and the exotic".
Nanchang is Vice-Minister Qui´s point writ large. Fittingly, the city now boasts that along the banks of the Gan river stands the world´s largest ferris wheel. A few hundred yards away crowds of young people gather every evening on a new promenade where there is a regular display of impressively tall and powerful fountains, which perform against a background of stirring classical European music. The municipal authorities probably hope that to a visitor the fountains will evoke new and exotic thoughts of Fontainebleau or the Palace of Versailles. Perhaps because I give too many talks at conferences, this visitor´s mind promptly summoned up images of Las Vegas, and the dancing fountains outside the Bellagio Hotel.
The ferris wheel and the fountains are both part of a brand new neighbourhood in Nanchang, a large area freshly built on what was previously a sandy floodplain of the river. The roads are easy to tour around because they are empty. So, to judge by the lack of lights on at night, are most of the buildings. No doubt they will soon fill, however.
