China and New Zealand - comparing local government strategies in attracting investment
Local government in New Zealand is characterised as having numerous failed and delayed infrastructure projects, turning continuously to central government with cap in hand to meet investment backlogs. This is very different is this from the situation in China.
Spring Festival business gathering for “returnee businesspeople” organized by Xiangjiang New District in Changsha, Hunan Province. Source: Lost in Translation
Now China is a very different country on the opposite end of every kind of scale of measurement compared to New Zealand, but local governments’ ability to capture economic benefit from China’s broader sociocultural movements is noteworthy.
To paraphrase, this is how Robert Wu from his excellent Lost in Translation substack puts it:
He says Chinese local governments “never waste a chance to promote business and investment. A growing trend for inland cities to attract investment nowadays is to target investors and entrepreneurs who were born and raised there but migrated to higher-tier cities.
I don’t know if this is a big thing in the West but Chinese people generally have this “strong attachment to roots and hometown乡土情结”. So this strategy makes sense, simply because those “returnee businesspeople” are not only familiar with local life but are also more willing to contribute to local development. (Probably not in the West, otherwise South Africa should be able to lure Elon Musk to set up a new gigafactory there.)”
Immediately I thought of the international to and fro or Kiwis across the globe. Could this approach be adopted and modified for our own returnees?
A recent webinar hosted by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise – the NZ Story Market Pulse Research 2023 Webinar on 13 February - demonstrated yet again that some of the most important parts of our story are not being told on the world stage. Who better to tell them than our internationally mobile Kiwis? Could a campaign be devised to encourage more of us to do that?
source: NZ Story Market Pulse Research