The 300 Billion Yuan Club and The Trillion Yuan Club

The 300 Billion Yuan Club (3000亿俱乐部) consists of cities in China that have an annual GDP of 300 billion yuan (about US$40 billion) or more. The municipalities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing are not included in the tabulation, as they are equivalent in administrative rank to provinces. The designation of a 300 Billion Yuan Club signifies both huge regional disparities in economic income, as well as the prevalent preoccupation in the Chinese government and media with the size of the GDP as the measurement of merit for a region and its political leaders. In an earlier post, I pointed to a movement under way to liberate the thought of the Chinese elite and masses from a slavish devotion to economic gigantism towards a spiritual renewal with more attention to civic participation and social concerns.

In 2006, the 6 cities on the 300 Billion Yuan Club [ch] are all located in the booming coastal provinces of Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shandong: Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wuxi, and Qingdao. In 2007, this exclusive club added 7 more cities: Foshan, Ningbo, Nanjing, Chengdu, Dongguan, Wuhan, and Dalian. Two of the new members are outside the coastal region: Wuhan and Chengdu.

Astonishingly, the GDP of any member of this club exceeds the GDP of any of the 5 poorest provinces in China: Gansu, Guizhou, Hainan, Qinghai, and Tibet. Top-ranked Guangzhou in the 300 Billion Yuan Club has a GDP that is almost ten times that of Qinghai Province!

The directly administered municipalities all have GDP's exceeding 300 billion yuan.
Beijing's estimated GDP in 2007 is about 900 billion yuan (US$124 billion). In 2006, Shanghai became the first municipality to exceed 1 trillion yuan in GDP (1.03 trillion yuan, or about US$129 billion). In comparison, in 2006 Chongqing has a GDP of 348.62 billion yuan (US$45.2 billion), while Tianjin has a GDP of 433.8 billion yuan (US$54.4 billion). The yardstick for measurement of economic achievement for province-level administrative units is the Trillion Yuan Club (GDP万亿俱乐部), and Shanghai is the only municipality to qualify as of this date (although Beijing is close). The members of this club are: Guangdong; Jiangsu; Shandong; Zhejiang; Henan; Hebei; Shanghai; Liaoning; Sichuan. The geographic distribution again indicates an overwhelming concentration of wealth in the coastal region.

Although Shanghai and the Lower Yangzi region have captured much of the limelight in Western coverage of China's economic progress in recent years, Guangdong (particularly the Pearl River Delta near Hong Kong and Macau) clearly still retains a leading position in the economic hierarchy in China. Guangdong ranks number 1 in the Trillion Yuan Club, while Guangzhou and Shenzhen hold the top two spots in the 300 Billion Yuan Club. In 2006 Guangzhou became the first city in mainland China to achieve a per capita GDP of US$10,000, threshhold for a developed economy by World Bank standards. In comparison, Beijing's per capita GDP is below US$8000 as of 2008, and Shanghai's per capita GDP was just below US$7,200 in 2006. It should be noted, however, that China's per capita GDP calculations include only the registered population (i.e. people with hukou and are permanent residents), but excludes the migrant population which is very sizable in cities like Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Beijing and Shanghai.

Among the new members of the 300 Billion Yuan Club are the Guangdong cities of Foshan and Dongguan. Both cities have grown at the annual rate of over 19% from 2004 to 2007. Particularly remarkable is the case of Dongguan, "once a sleepy town and now an industrial power in the making" since the late 1990s. Today it is a world leader in the production of toys, furniture, electronics and other commodities, and also home to one of the excesses of global consumerism, the world's largest mall, the South China Mall, which opened in 2005 with a gross leasable area of 7.1 million square feet.

South China Mall, World's Largest Mall