Forty years ago, Shenzhen was a fishing town of 30,000 people. Today, it is a city of more than 17 million and one of the world’s great manufacturing hubs, built in large part on the back of a simple but radical idea; the industrial park. China has since exported that idea more aggressively than almost any other piece of its development model, planting parks from the forests outside Minsk to the Red Sea coast of Egypt.
Two of its better-known successes, in Belarus and in Egypt, got there by rather different routes, and the gap between them is exactly what African governments now courting Chinese investment under Beijing’s Global Development Initiative (GDI) should study. But the lesson is not to copy and paste China’s parks wholesale, but to understand what each one had to do differently to succeed.
Consider Great Stone, the China-Belarus industrial park outside Minsk. A decade ago it was, in the words of one official, “a piece of white paper” — forest and swampland. Today it hosts more than 150 resident companies making everything from unmanned aerial vehicles to pharmaceuticals, drawing roughly $1 billion in investment, with the Belarusian state contributing less than five per cent of the total. What made it work was sequencing – roads, water, gas and customs infrastructure went in before a single factory was built, and a one-stop administrative office, modelled on China’s Suzhou Industrial Park, cut approval times that elsewhere can take a month down to under two hours.
Now consider Egypt. The China-Egypt TEDA Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone began in 2008 on a stretch of desert sand south of the Suez Canal. Today it hosts more than 170 companies, has generated close to $5 billion in cumulative sales and directly employs nearly 10,000 Egyptians, in a fibreglass and heavy-engineering cluster President Sisi has called the most successful project on the Suez Canal corridor. The zone thrived because it was redesigned around Egypt’s own labour market and supply chains rather than China’s blueprint.
Amongst the clearest illustrations of these dynamics was a recent seminar organised for African countries on the construction and management of industrial parks, convened at Suzhou University of Science and Technology and sponsored by China’s Ministry of Commerce. Visits to operating zones and exchanges with the planners and developers, including Hangzhou and Shanghai, gave concrete shape to these lessons.
Africa already has experience of Chinese-linked parks, from Ethiopia’s industrial zones to TEDA itself, and the lesson from both Belarus and Egypt is that technology and cash are the easy part. What determines whether a park becomes a genuine cluster or an expensive shell is the governance underneath it, and the willingness to adapt it to local conditions rather than impose it.
China’s own model rests on a layered division of labour. The state sets direction and incentives, an enterprise-led development company manages the park day to day, and once it reaches critical mass, the market takes over. African governments need a functioning equivalent – a single authority with real power, rather than a park caught between ministries that each claim partial ownership and none take responsibility.
The second lesson is about capability, not just capacity. China’s GDI has backed thousands of vocational training places through schemes such as the Luban Workshops. TEDA now employs nearly 10,000 Egyptians, over 97 per cent of staff in some resident firms. But training bolted on after a park opens is no substitute for designing local skills transfer in from day one. A park that encourages joint ventures, local equity and management training from the outset stands a far better chance of sustainability.
The third lesson is fit. Great Stone succeeded partly because Belarus already had skilled engineers and a useful position on Eurasian trade routes. TEDA succeeded only once its developers stopped trying to recreate Tianjin in the desert and built instead around Egyptian labour costs and export markets. Too many parks have been cited for political symbolism — a presidential ribbon-cutting, a flagship for a state visit — with too little regard for whether the surrounding economy can absorb what the park produces.
None of this requires Africa to replicate China’s political system or its scale of state capital. What is transferable is the discipline, infrastructure, a governance structure with real authority, skills and equity, and match the park to the economy that already exists. China spent four decades learning these lessons. Fortunately, African governments have the advantage of studying China’s successes and mistakes from the outside.
The writer is an expert in China-Africa relations
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