Building ties with China
- Japan's Green Aid Plan for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC (United States)
During the past year, reforms in China have greatly expanded opportunities for foreign investors in the power sector. On January 11, 1993, Chinese Premier Li Peng announced that China would expand its use of foreign capital for power projects and welcomed foreign investment. This announcement comes as part of a rapid liberalization and restructuring of the Chinese economy as well as the growing need for electricity to sustain the country's galloping economic growth. By the year 2000, China plans to expand total capacity from 165,000 MW to 300,000 MW, requiring from 15,000 MW to 17,000 MW of new capacity additions each year. According to Cheng Li of the Department of International Cooperation at the Ministry of Electric Power - formerly the Ministry of Energy - China will only be able to finance about 75 percent of its development needs and is now looking to foreign investors to make up the remaining 25 percent. Some estimates suggest there could be as much as 70,000 MW open to outside firms, making China one of the world's largest emerging markets for private power development. The opportunities developing in China have generated growing interest in the United States. In the past ten months, trade missions to China and other activities have been organized to explore the opportunities and assess the competitiveness of US firms. Not surprisingly, the China market has also attracted considerable attention in Japan. To put recent US initiatives in perspective, it is instructive to compare these initiatives with those of Japan. Differences are apparent at both the level of the firm and the government, differences that may have important implications for whether US or Japanese firms are more successful in the years to come.
- OSTI ID:
- 7187216
- Journal Information:
- Independent Energy; (United States), Journal Name: Independent Energy; (United States) Vol. 24:3; ISSN 1043-7320; ISSN IDPEEW
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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