On September 23, the Several Provisions of Pudong New Area for Advancing the High-quality Development of Special Industrial Parks was passed at the seventh meeting of the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress of Pudong New Area and will come into force on October 15. The enactment of this document fully reflects Pudong’s philosophy of advancing reform with the rule-of-law mindset and methods, which will further promote the high-quality development of Pudong’s industries.

Professor Ren Hao from the Department of Organizational Management (under preparation), Tongji SEM and distinguished researcher Zhang Jianbo from the Institute of Industry Research, Shanghai Jiao Tong University have recently been interviewed by the 632 Observation column of the Oriental Financial Pudong Channel. During the interview, they focused on the Several Provisions of Pudong New Area for Advancing the High-quality Development of Special Industrial Parks and expressed their views on Pudong New Area’s breaking the bottleneck of space and promoting park development by rule of law.

Q1: How should we understand the term Special Industrial Park mentioned in the document?

Ren Hao: First of all, the industry of the park should be “specific”, usually the definite leading industry. Secondly, the park operators should be “exceptional”. Thirdly, the parks should have “ultra-strong” industrial chains. Such three characteristics make industrial parks different from general parks, and that’s the reason they are called special industrial parks.

Q2: When we talk about Pudong New Area, we won’t think that the land area is small because it accounts for 1/5 of Shanghai’s land area, so why is there still a problem of scarce land resources?

Ren Hao: Space is required for industrial development, but land resources are always limited. The better an enterprise, the more it needs to develop, especially quality land resources, which are always relatively scarce. In particular, in mature development zones, land resources will become increasingly fewer for many reasons: some land needs to be used for strategic reserve; some land needs to be allocated for different purposes, including education, health, natural environment, roads and municipal purposes; the state and the government have some clear restrictive conditions on the usable area of industrial land.

Q3: How do you ensure that the remaining quality land resources can be put to good use?

Ren Hao: Besides the mixed use of land, actually, we can also increase the floor area ratio of the new industrial land called M0. We make a breakthrough by increasing the use value of the land.

Q4: Since the times, parks and industries will all develop and change as time goes by, what changes do you think will happen to the functions and positioning of the parks?

Ren Hao: A perfect industrial ecosystem of the parks was emphasized in the past. But in the future, to co-lead or lead the development of parks, the ecosystem should also include social ecology and natural ecology in addition to industrial ecology so as to eventually form a triune park ecosystem. The natural ecology refers to the work environment. We should not only focus on the conditions of the office buildings but also see how their environment is. So, in order to upgrade, innovate, and lead the industry, these are things to be improved and done.

Q5: What roles do state-owned enterprises and social capital play in the development of parks? What are their respective advantages and how do they complement each other?

Ren Hao: I think that as far as parks are concerned, from the top-level perspective, the parks are mainly state-owned. For smaller parks in parks (PIP) or branch parks, we should create conditions and encourage more private enterprises to build PIPs and branch parks as entities so that state-owned enterprises and social capital can complement each other.