Tianjin is an hour by train to the east of Beijing. When people talk about Tianjin, it can be a little confusing, as one often hears the words TEDA, Tangu, and the Binhai Bay New Area all spoken in the same sentance. TEDA (Tianjin EconomicalDevelopment Area) is a conglomeration of five business parks started in Tianjin in the early- to mid-eighties. Tianjin, and later the central government, invested in TEDA heavily through infrastructure improvements and the usual SEZ tax breaks. This is where Motorola has come, and it’s where hundreds of thousands of companies are located. It has a very robust manufacturing base; with Toyota cars, food producers such as Nestle, Coca Cola, and instant noodles, not to mention large pharmaceutical companies such as GFK and others. In specialised TEDA zones, there are also chemical parks to the north and petro-chemical parks to the south. The central part of TEDA is like a mini-town, with administrative headquarters and some office developments in the Tangu area, which neighbours Tianjin port. This is where the confusion starts, because Tangu lies within the boundaries of a vast new industrial development zone called the Binhai New Area, however TEDA now operates as a separate legal entity, and is run along private-company lines. TEDA is likely to remain a force to be reckoned with, as with Waigaochao in Shanghai or BDA in Beijing have remained strong despite of further development around them.

The Binhai New Area (BNA) covers an area of 2,270 sq kilometers, the size of Singapore, and hugs the coastline in a vast north-south swathe along the coast. The general plan appears to be to take the success of TEDA and draw it out of TEDA’s 5 strongholds.