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Riding on both sides for success

By Qian Yanfeng and Huo Yan (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-12-11 10:07

Luo Xiulian was among the first few locals to start selling Chinese goods across the border, bringing Vietnamese rice and aniseed to Pingxiang at the same time.

As early as 1986, when there was still tension between the two countries, Luo, like many fellow villagers pressed by poverty, relied on border trade in return for food to feed her family of six.

"Life was too hard at that time," said the 53-year-old mother of four grown-up children. "Income from the farmland could barely meet our needs as a big family. Somehow I had to find a way out," she said.

It was not easy. Luo remembers hearing land mine explosions on her way to Vietnam. Once she was even caught and had all items she smuggled across the border confiscated. "I had to learn how to travel under the cover of night," she said.

Things did not start to look up until six years later, when Puzhai was officially established as a border town for locals to conduct trade with their Vietnamese neighbors. Encouraged by the new opportunities, Luo enlarged her trading business to include batteries and kettles as well as shoes and clothes, and settled down in the town with a small shop.

"Chinese products are in great demand in Vietnam. At the height of the business boom, I sold 20,000 pairs of shoes in a single day," Luo said. A shy and modest woman at first impression, Luo could not conceal her excitement and pride when talking of these past experiences.

Another decade later, Luo had bought herself two apartments in Pingxiang. She now enjoys a steady annual income of "hundreds of thousands of yuan".

Other than lifting locals from poverty, the border trade has attracted people across the country with its promise of riches. Shrewd businesspeople from Zhejiang province and neighboring Guangdong province have also reportedly discovered the potential of trade in Puzhai.

And there could be more to come. The government recently introduced policies to further promote border trade - starting November, the quota for duty-free imports at China's border towns has been raised from 3,000 to 8,000 yuan per day per capita. That means Chinese businesspeople now have a lot more leeway in their border transactions, observers said.

The prosperity of the border trade between China and Vietnam has also promoted the development of the processing trade industry in Pingxiang, with an increasing number of enterprises moving in to take advantage of the resources from both countries.

The Guangxi Traditional Chinese Medicine Company is one of those that have identified these advantages. Recognizing that China and Vietnam are highly complementary in raw materials for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the company said it makes use of Pingxiang's strategic location by setting up a factory there and manufactures TCM based on imports of Vietnamese materials.

"Being closer to the source of raw materials is just part of the reason why we came here," said Lan Ping, manager of the company. "From the time we started two years ago, we have been targeting ASEAN markets. Guangxi in this regard is the ideal location."

The company currently exports products to three Southeast Asian countries, including Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, Lan said. In two or three years' time, however, it would have half of its products exported to all the countries in the region.

China's economic ties with ASEAN is being strengthened with the construction of the China-ASEAN free-trade area, to be completed by 2010. In January this year, the State Council also approved the Guangxi Beibu Gulf Economic Development Plan (2006-20) as part of its commitment to promote the development of the region.

Over the years, ASEAN has become the biggest trade partner for Guangxi. Last year's trade volume between the two regions reached $2.9 billion, more than one-third of Guangxi's total foreign trade.

All these mean huge business opportunities, Lan said. "This is the right place and we are quite optimistic about the future."

Proficient in the Vietnamese language, Huang Meilian runs a large mahogany furniture business in Puzhai. Huang, 31, grew up bilingual because her family had been living in Vietnam since the beginning of the last century.

But she was only 2 years old when her family was forced to return to China in 1979, together with about 270,000 Chinese who were driven back in the late 1970s when the Sino-Vietnamese War broke out.

Memories of the war are blurry and distant for Huang, but she remembers vividly how her father sentimentalized over life in Vietnam, where he had spent "the best part of his life". More importantly, it was because her grandparents are buried there.

Entering Vietnam was not possible for her family until the 1990s and the barriers weighed heavily on her father, Huang said. Now, her whole family is able to visit her grandparents' tomb every year during China's traditional Tomb Sweeping Day, and, also for her father, to meet friends who were left behind during a tumultuous time.

Unlike her father's tenacious grip on wartime memories, Huang said the younger generation does not seem to hold much interest for that period in history.

"It (the war) seems so far away," Huang said. "Look at us nowadays. It seems nothing like that has ever happened."

Together with her Vietnamese partners, Huang has since turned her mahogany business into one that rakes in "tens of millions of yuan annually", and she said she owes much of her success to her Vietnamese friends.

"I have very good ties with them; they are quite friendly. I won't be able to enjoy such a large business without their help," she said.

At Vietnam's Bac Ninh province 180 km away from Puzhai, where she imports all her mahogany furniture, Huang said there is an equally large population of Chinese businessmen who are doing business in the area. For Huang, nationality is no obstacle to her ties with the Vietnamese, since historically, people on both sides of the border share much in common.

"We are just like two sides of a coin, very similar to each other," she said.

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