The council to promote the cooperation among Bohai Bay-rim enterprises was officially established on June 28 in Tianjin. The same day reports appeared on newspapers about Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's inspection tour around Tianjin, during which he called for further development of the Binhai New District of Tianjin to boost the growth of Tianjin and the Bohai Bay-rim regional economy.

The Bohai Bay-rim economic region is made up of Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong and Liaoning, the so-called 3+2 area. Covering 518,000 square kilometers, the area, with a population of 230 million, or 17.5 percent of the national total, generates gross product of 3.8 trillion yuan, 28.2 percent of the country's total.

There is another view that Shanxi and Inner Mogolia are also part of the Bohai Bay-rim area. However, it is generally agreed that, unlike the Pearl River Delta or the Yangtze River Delta, the Bohai Bay-rim is a complex economic region, integrating three economic sub-regions, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Shandong peninsula, and Liaoning peninsula.

The 183-quare-kilometer Binhai New District holds three administrative areas, Tanggu, Hangu and Dagang, as well as some towns. The Tianjing port, national-level development park, bonded area, maritime hi-tech zone, export processing zone and the bonded logistics park there combine to make it a multi-functional compound. In addition, the bases for the petrochemical and metallurgy industry also have begun to take off there.

Figures cited by Dai Xianglong, Mayor of Tianjin, proved how the Binhai New District powers the whole Bohai Bay-rim economy.

Gross product of the Binhai New District peaked at 125 billion yuan in 2004 after rising at an annual rate of 20.8 percent since 1994. It accounts for 43 percent, 17.3 percent and 3.1 percent of the total in Tianjin, Beijing-Tianjin and the Bohai Bay-rim respectively.

Its 13.7 billion USD export a year is 66 percent of the total export from Tianjin, 33 percent from Beijing and Tianjin, 10.1 percent from Bohai Bay-rim.

For the 11 years since 1994, the area has actually used 18.7 billion USD foreign investment, which represented 62 percent of the full amount used by Tianjin, 30 percent by Beijing and Tianjin, and 10.2 percent by Bohai Bay-rim.

More than 1,000 enterprises around China are suppliers for manufacturers in the Binhai New District. Foreign capital flocked into the area and built their presence here as a foothold in China's inland.

"Ambitious to enhance the economic strength of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area and the Bohai Bay-rim, the Binhai New District will take the advantages in location, its port, its land, and its function and offer good service. This will make it possible to realize the economic integration within a framework at a high level, to speed up the industrial transfer between regions, and to have the area real driver of the whole regional economy." said Pi Qiansheng, director of the Binhai New District administration, who is fully confident on the prospect of the cooperation between the area and the Bohai Bay-rim.

By People's Daily Online