Published: November 19, 2012
TIANJIN, China — China is full of big bets that the country’s breakneck economic growth will continue apace, but few are bigger than the vast Yujiapu financial district here.
Zhang Gaoli, the Communist Party secretary of Tianjin, at the 18th Party Congress on Friday. He is closely associated with the district project.
Nicknamed China’s new Manhattan, the district comprises at least 47 skyscrapers being built on desolate coastal salt flats 100 miles southeast of Beijing. Financed by huge loans from state-owned banks, the district is an immense public works project, and is closely associated with Zhang Gaoli, the little-known Communist Party secretary of Tianjin who joined the new seven-member Politburo Standing Committee last week at the end of the 18th Party Congress.
Mr. Zhang has emerged as the man expected, after approval by the National People’s Congress in March, to handle day-to-day management of the Chinese economy. He won out over Wang Qishan, who has a much deeper background in economic and financial policy making and was seen as likely to clash with and perhaps even overshadow the incoming prime minister, Li Keqiang. Chinese leaders have not forgotten how Zhu Rongji, with a similarly deep background, managed to dominate economic policy making from his position as executive vice premier in the mid-1990s.
As the Yujiapu project makes clear, Mr. Zhang has been a defender of huge government-guided investments, an approach that very much fits the mold of ambitious party officials eager to get ahead within the existing power structure. At the same time, say experts and people who know him, he has cultivated an image as a stern bureaucratic taskmaster, a politician who can get things done by working with powerful business interests rather than challenging them.
“He’s a very strong guy,” said Jean-Luc Charles, the general manager of Airbus’s assembly plant here for the A320 jetliner, who had nothing but praise for Mr. Zhang. “He sets a target and people run.”
But Mr. Zhang also has some surprising characteristics. In Tianjin, he has pushed to expand retailing and other services as a way to create jobs beyond construction and manufacturing. He also is an advocate for firm environmental and labor standards aimed at improving the lives of ordinary Chinese.
After a series of increases during Mr. Zhang’s tenure, the city’s minimum wage is now 4 percent higher than Beijing’s — even though Tianjin is considerably poorer over all. And while Tianjin cracked down on labor protests in the summer of 2010, the municipal authorities have since set up a trade union for migrant workers, who usually have few legal protections.
The migrant workers’ union “negotiated a reasonable deal for sanitation workers in the city,” said Geoffrey Crothall, the spokesman for China Labor Bulletin, a nonprofit group in Hong Kong that favors the establishment of independent unions in China.
Tianjin residents described two street protests here in April, one against a $1.7 billion expansion project at a chemical plant and the other against a real estate developer who was accused of absconding with apartment buyers’ deposits. The authorities were quick to negotiate compromises in both cases, suspending construction at the chemical plant, even though it was being built by Sinopec, one of the largest state-owned enterprises, while tracking down the developer and requiring restitution. They did not resort to calling riot police to disperse the protesters, as municipal leaders have sometimes done elsewhere in China, residents said.
Tianjin has adopted many Western pollution regulations and in some cases tightened them further. Air and water emissions from the Airbus factory here are monitored by pollution equipment that is connected around the clock to government monitoring computers.
It is not clear, though, whether these policies reflect a personal commitment by Mr. Zhang to progressive social policies or his penchant for setting rules and making sure people follow them. Perhaps both.
“Zhang is very strong with all the regulations — do it in accordance with the regulations and no joke,” Mr. Charles said.
