ADB to help China turn former Copper City into redevelopment model
MANILA -- The Asian Development Bank (ADB) said Thursday that the ADB is helping China to transform its resource-exhausted western "Copper City" of Baiyin into an industrial center, offering a model of redevelopment to other towns facing dwindling mining resources.
Baiyin, a 1.75 million-people city in China's western province of Gansu, was established in the 1950s under the country's planned economy to support copper mining production. However, the copper mines had been exhausted and were closed in the 1980s, while mining of associated mineral resources such as lead and zinc is also on the decline.
Baiyin is far from the only city haunted with hindrance to development in China, and therefore the Chinese government has identified 118 ones that have developed around the mining of natural resources. Most of these cities have encountered difficulty in the urbanization process due to their remoteness, imbalanced economic structures, limited financial capacity, poor urban infrastructure and limited development prospects, said the ADB.
Of the cities, 18 are classified as resource-exhausted cities, posing a special challenge to urbanization in China. In these cities, using Baiyin as a model for redevelopment, miners could be retrained to work in other fields including agriculture, tourism or technology.
A 162 million-U.S. dollar project has recently been launched for the development of Baiyin, includes an 80 million-dollar loan from ADB, said the Manila-based multilateral development finance institution in a press release, adding that the balance is funded by the Chinese government participants including the Baiyin Municipal Government.
The project will facilitate the economic transformation of Baiyin by strengthening urban services and infrastructure, the lender said.
ADB's involvement in the Baiyin project will provide not only financial support, but also international knowledge and policy advice for the municipal government to help ensure that the economic transformation will be accomplished in a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner, the lender said.
The project will develop industrial land by providing basic public infrastructure including roads, water supply pipelines, drainage pipelines and sewers, heating supply pipelines, optical-fabric cable and electricity distribution lines, lighting and public green areas, it added.
ADB will also construct and rehabilitate roads and bridges, expand centralized district heating services, help the municipal government design and introduce an effective environmental management system, and develop an integrated urban transport planning and management system, the bank added.
"Baiyin stands for a new model of economic transformation from a resource-exhausted mining city into a new industrial center through technology upgrading and extension, and diversification of the existing production chains," said Fei Yue, Social Sector Specialist of ADB's East Asia Department.
