[Kabar-indonesia] WP: In Rural China, Poverty Forces Men and Women Apart [+WSJ Page One]

[JoyoNews at aol.com]

4 reports: 

- Two Chinese Villages, Two Views of Rural Poverty
  [Women on Their Own And Men Who Sit Idle]

- WSJ Page One: China's Rise as Auto-Parts Power 
  Reflects New Manufacturing Edge

- NYT: Japan Makes More Cars Elsewhere 

- Asia Times: Investors ride China's theme park craze 

The Washington Post
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
-front page-

Two Chinese Villages, Two Views of Rural Poverty

Women on Their Own And Men Who Sit Idle

By Maureen Fan
Washington Post Foreign Service

DACITAN, China -- Nestled mid-slope in the foothills of China's 
second-poorest province, Dacitan is a village run almost entirely by women, mothers who 
work the potato and wheat fields while their husbands are away.

Seventy miles to the east, perched on a remote mountain ridge above a 
collapsing dirt road, Sale is thick with men who sit idle, hoping for opportunity 
that never arrives and women who rarely do.

Both are Muslim villages populated by members of the ethnic Hui minority, and 
both are stark examples of the cost of China's blistering economic growth. 
While cities are booming, drawing migrant workers from the countryside and 
demonstrably improving life in some rural towns, other communities are shrinking. 
In the case of Dacitan, the women are left behind for months at a time as the 
men search for work; in Sale, the men say that few women want husbands in a 
poor, isolated village such as their own.

"Life here is so miserable, no one wants to marry the men," said Ma Xiuhua, 
42, who grew up in Sale and was home visiting her mother. "For girls, the ideal 
way is to marry someone in the city or in a better village."

Cities hold promise for Chinese today, as home to the new wealth that is far 
removed from the rural poor. In the last 25 years, China has lifted about 400 
million people out of poverty, according to a World Bank report, but efforts 
to reduce poverty have slowed significantly since the late 1990s and have 
declined since 2001. Millions of people still eke out a living in conditions that 
barely support life.

"Currently, the poverty elimination work for the Chinese government is much 
harder than 20 years ago. Those people who have been left behind are extremely 
poor and don't have enough skills to be lifted out of poverty," said Wang 
Yukai, an expert in rural poverty and deputy director of the National School of 
Administration in Beijing, which trains government officials.

Here in rural Gansu province, in northern central China, treatment for a bad 
kidney or a broken shoulder can cost a year's salary. The rising cost of 
gasoline and fertilizer, plus local fees for road building, irrigation and family 
planning have chipped away at gains derived from the new economy.

Each community survives in its own way.

"Before they went away to work as migrant workers, most of the heavy farm 
work was done by the men," said Chen Maiya, a 30-year-old resident of Dacitan. 
"Now it is done by the women. Sometimes I feel tired, but I can do nothing."

Women Left Behind

About 1,200 people live in Dacitan (pronounced DA-tse-tahn). It is the women 
who sustain the village from day to day. They line the main road on their way 
to work in the fields. They care for the children. They cook the meals.

Their husbands spend six to 10 months a year away from home. Even when they 
return to help with the harvest, as they did on a recent day, they are hard to 
spot.

The women are not in the habit of complaining publicly. Ma Haijizhe, for one, 
has no time.

Wearing mismatched silver earrings, a black velvet head covering and a shy 
smile, the 31-year-old mother of three said she rises each day at 6 a.m., cleans 
the floor and furniture, then cooks breakfast. Afterward, she weeds the wheat 
fields, then returns to cook lunch and feed the chickens. After more field 
work, she comes home at 6 p.m. to prepare dinner. After that, she and the 
children sit on a large hard bed, which also serves as the dining table, and she 
tells them stories or watches TV.

Her husband, Ma Yagubai, was among the men to arrive home recently. He had 
spent six months searching the Qinghai mountains for caterpillar fungus, a 
medicinal herb that is said to strengthen both lungs and sexual prowess and that is 
sold in pharmacies and airport gift shops for $200 an ounce.

He set down his belongings in the courtyard: a blanket, a sack of clothes and 
two empty cans of cooking oil. In a month, he said, he would be off again, 
this time to work at a construction site elsewhere in Gansu. Rural residents in 
the province make, on average, $247 a year. Last year, Ma Yagubai made only 
$250, so he didn't come home at all.

"It's not so difficult for me," he said. "This is my life."

His wife expressed a similar sense of indifference: "I don't miss him, I 
don't miss him at all," she said.

As Ma Yagubai spoke to visitors, his wife moved to the blackened shed that 
serves as a kitchen for her dirt-floor home. In seconds, she broke branches to 
stoke a fire, added oil to a large pot, sliced vegetables and potatoes, and 
gave her 5-year-old son a package of dried ramen noodles to chew on. She winced 
as she burned a finger in her haste. The next moment, she hoisted firewood onto 
her back to move it out of a light drizzle, then washed rice bowls with a 
swipe of her hand and a dash of boiled water before shooing chickens out of the 
courtyard for exercise.

Lunch was served in minutes -- steamed bread and a slightly spicy bowl of 
shredded cabbage and potatoes. It's the same for every meal. Her children "don't 
ask for anything else because that's all they know," she said. When she 
finally paused, she declined to join her family for the meal.

"Men eat first, women eat second," she said.

There is a Chinese proverb that applies to Ma Haijizhe: "Women hold up half 
the sky." But she has not heard of it. She has never attended school.

"It doesn't matter if I'm here or not," she said.

Her neighbor, Chen Maiya, is just as resigned to the status quo in the 
village. And, like Ma Haijizhe, she shows deference to the men.

"Although women do most of the work, it is the men who are in charge and who 
give the orders when they are here," she said. "If women were in charge, I 
don't know what would happen. Besides, it's impossible."

Also impossible was the suggestion that the women might be lonely. Asked if 
she missed her husband, who left for the city of Lhasa two months ago, Chen 
burst out laughing. She missed him, she said, but only in the sense that he "can 
come back and help me with the work."

And then Chen, wearing a red and black coat with sequins, a green velvet head 
scarf and orange paint on her fingernails, excused herself. She had to cook 
lunch for eight neighbors and relatives.

Years ago, many of Dacitan's 250 households hardly had enough to eat. Now 
children take steamed bread to school. Even though the village has not prospered 
like large towns or other cities, some progress has come. Houses are no longer 
made of just mud and straw. A paved road to the village was also built last 
year.

Still, Ma Yagubai must walk two hours to the closest bus route.

"Compared to 10 years ago, you can see the clothes people are wearing are 
better," he said. "But the food is the same. It used to be that you couldn't 
drive a car here. You would have to bicycle or walk.

"It is the same now," he said, "but I can always ask a neighbor for a ride on 
his three-wheel motorcycle."

Men Going Nowhere

To arrive in Sale (pronounced sa-LUH) is to drive up a dilapidated road and 
see men and boys everywhere. Women are scarce.

A large portion of the men say they are bachelors. They complain that they 
are so poor no one will marry them, unless the women come from even more 
impoverished villages. Dowries can be 600 percent of what a man here makes each year.

The village is home to about 1,000 people. It is at least five miles from the 
closest paved road, making escape difficult for anyone without connections or 
money. The slopes are steep, and the men say they cannot leave all the 
farming to the women who remain. Every rooftop has a lifeless hose that droops down 
to a metal bucket meant to catch rainwater, increasingly infrequent. The 
drinking water is gray.

"The road is broken, it's a mountainous region and there is no water," said 
Ma Jinghai, 26, who returned to Sale recently after two months on a 
construction site. He earned $125 but had to spend more than half that on his bus trip 
home.

Given the conditions and their despair, the men have resorted to a dubious 
means of securing wives, some villagers say: luring women here on false 
pretenses.

"Some women were tricked here -- they don't even understand the local 
dialect," said Ma Jinghai, who said he was upfront with his own wife, telling her 
exactly how poor he was when they met in the city of Lanzhou.

Stories here are often told in piecemeal fashion, with a wariness reserved 
for strangers, and not everyone is forthcoming. But walk into some of the homes, 
and the picture Ma Jinghai described becomes clearer.

Just south of Sale's only main intersection, near a fetid pool that children 
swim in and donkeys drink from, is a lonely-looking house with a dirt 
courtyard.

Inside, Ma Hasan, 34, said he was the poorest man in the village. Then he 
bragged that his wife was from Shaanxi province and college-educated.

"I cheated her here. I told her there's a very fun place . . . and we can 
have a lot of fun there," he said. That was six years ago, and for all he knows, 
he said, her parents might think she's dead.

"I have no problem meeting them," he said, "but what if they come and see 
this village and tell her she cannot stay in such a poor village? What will I do? 
I'm afraid to lose her."

His wife, once known as Liu Ting and now called Haliman, looks different from 
the rest of the villagers. She is Han Chinese, with plump cheeks and a 
nervous demeanor. She emerged for a visitor and waved but said nothing. Ma said his 
wife's journey to Sale began in a cheap restaurant in a Lanzhou market.

"She was working in a nearby shopping center as a salesperson," Ma said. 
"Three of my friends who were also friends of hers told me they wanted to hook me 
up with her. . . . They asked me how do I feel about this girl, do I want to 
marry her. I said yes. And then they asked her, and she said no."

So Ma promised a good time instead. Then his friends forced her into a car 
with them and Ma and drove the three hours back to Sale. "She resisted my 
advances at first for a week, and then it was done," he said.

Another villager, Ma Jun, 23, played down the number of women brought to Sale 
against their will. "We only have 10 girls who were cheated here," he said.

Ma Jun's family negotiated his wife's dowry down to $2,500, but that was 
still a steep price. Last year, working with a road repair crew, he earned only 
$625.

Her family gave the couple a new washing machine, one of only a few in the 
village. There were firecrackers, and 100 guests came out to celebrate.

At the wedding, a rare occasion in Sale, half the village came to watch the 
couple eat.

Researcher Jin Ling contributed to this report.

-------------------------------------------

The Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Page One

China's Rise as Auto-Parts Power
Reflects New Manufacturing Edge

By ANDREW BATSON

BEIJING -- Raising the bar for competitors around the world, China is 
shifting its manufacturing resources to increasingly sophisticated goods, as shown by 
its rapid emergence as a global powerhouse in the auto-parts industry.

Just a few years ago, Chinese-made automotive components were plagued by a 
reputation for poor quality, and often cost more than U.S. or German parts. 
Detractors said the precision engineering required for the best parts was beyond 
the reach of inexperienced Chinese companies and their low-cost workers.

Last year, however, China for the first time exported more parts than its 
fast-growing auto industry purchased from abroad. Quality has improved so much 
that major Western auto makers like Volkswagen AG and DaimlerChrysler AG say 
they plan in coming years to buy billions of dollars of Chinese-made components 
-- such as brakes, fuel pumps, wheels and steering systems.

Those gains show how China continues to evolve as a manufacturer, posing new 
challenges for rivals in the U.S., Europe and Japan. After earning its stripes 
as a maker of simple consumer goods, such as furniture and textiles, China 
has branched out, quickly coming to dominate more labor-intensive parts of the 
consumer-electronics business, such as computer assembly, and moving into a 
broader range of industries.

The country's production of machinery and transportation equipment has 
surged, and export of those goods -- which range from auto parts to forklifts to 
vacuum cleaners -- totaled $352 billion last year, a fourfold increase from 2000.

Meanwhile, motor-vehicle production here has nearly tripled, and China is on 
pace to overtake Germany as the world's third-biggest auto maker. It has 
become the world's second-largest car market in terms of sales as millions of 
Chinese buy cars for the first time. Millions more are expected to do so as their 
incomes rise and car prices fall.

Now, "China competes in the entire range of products from telecom equipment 
to textiles," says Hafiz Pasha, director of the United Nations Development 
Program's Asia bureau.

The transition comes at a sensitive time for the U.S. and Europe, which have 
been finding it harder to hold on to high-paying manufacturing jobs. 
Employment in the U.S. auto-parts industry fell to about 644,000 in 2004 from about 
721,000 in 2002, according to government figures.

More job losses could be on the way: Some major U.S. parts makers -- 
including Delphi Corp., which has plants in China -- have sought bankruptcy-court 
protection. And small and midsize suppliers, which often don't have the resources 
to set up lower-cost operations abroad, are facing growing pressure.

"In the past two years, Chinese bids for auto-parts orders have driven 
customer price targets to a level below our costs on some products," said Larry 
Denton, chairman and chief executive of Rochester Hills, Mich., parts maker Dura 
Automotive Systems Inc., at a recent government hearing in the U.S.

U.S. parts makers have also raised concerns about their access to the huge 
Chinese market. Earlier this year, the U.S. joined the European Union in asking 
the World Trade Organization to overturn a Chinese tariff policy that the two 
trading partners say discourages imports of auto parts.

China says the policy, introduced in 2005, is designed to prevent tariff 
fraud. It imposes additional tariffs on auto parts that exceed certain thresholds 
in terms of value or number of components. China says the idea is to 
discourage anyone who might seek to circumvent its auto tariffs by importing dismantled 
vehicles at the lower tariff rate that applies to parts and reassembling them 
in China.

The growth of the Chinese parts industry comes as manufacturers here 
increasingly grapple with rising wages and higher energy and raw-materials costs. In 
China's booming coastal areas, where many factories are located, land and labor 
are no longer as cheap and abundant as they once were, says Lü Tie, a scholar 
at the Institute of Industrial Economics in Beijing. Those areas "are now 
pretty close to the level of middle-income countries. Their comparative advantage 
is changing," he says.

With local wages on the rise, Chinese manufacturers are seeking to improve 
their efficiency and reduce their reliance on low-cost labor. They are 
increasingly churning out higher-value products such as auto parts and shifting away 
from traditional exports such as textiles and toys.

Some Western companies are reaping the benefits of China's quest for greater 
productivity. Rockwell Automation Inc., a Milwaukee maker of high-end 
equipment and software to run factories, said it has seen its China business grow by 
more than 30% a year since 2003.

"There is a misperception" about China, says Scott Summerville, Rockwell's 
president for Asia Pacific. While China still has a lot of labor-intensive 
manufacturing, he says, "there's a big push right now to make Chinese companies 
globally competitive. You can't do that just with cheap labor."

Rockwell is part of an influx of foreign money and expertise that has 
contributed to the improving quality of Chinese-made auto parts and other products. 
The world's biggest auto companies are also bulking up in China, looking for 
growth that is increasingly hard to come by in mature markets. They, in turn, 
often demand that their parts makers be able to supply them directly in China.

In recent months, such major Western auto-parts suppliers as Robert Bosch 
GmbH, of Stuttgart, Germany, and ArvinMeritor Inc., Troy, Mich., have made 
significant investments in Chinese factories that can make parts for the local 
market as well as for export.

The higher standards that global companies have introduced, combined with the 
international growth of local auto-parts makers like Wanxiang Group, has 
spurred innovation. To gain access to more customers and better technology, 
Wanxiang has bought several U.S. companies and has expressed interest in buying some 
assets from Delphi. It says its sales have been growing an average of 26% a 
year and reached 25.2 billion yuan, or about $3.15 billion, in 2005.

Smaller Chinese companies are also climbing the technology ladder. Huaxiang 
Group, based in the coastal city of Ningbo, started out in 1982 making plastic 
caps for medicine bottles. Now it makes molded plastics for auto interiors. 
Though it has been supplying VW's China operations, about 20% of its 2005 
revenue of 2.25 million yuan came from exports, says Xu Peiqi, who runs the office 
of the board of directors. Huaxiang opened an office in May in VW's hometown of 
Wolfsburg, Germany.

"The companies are very focused on exports," says Huang Xiaohua, secretary 
general of the Auto Parts Industry Association of Ningbo. "Products are going 
up-market," as local manufacturers are increasingly becoming first-tier and 
second-tier suppliers for the major auto makers, he says.

"When we started exporting in 1997, people argued that you couldn't make" 
auto parts cheaper in China, says Jack Perkowski, chief executive of 
Beijing-based parts maker Asimco Technologies Ltd. "People also argued that China would 
never be a large car market."

Now, he says, "the conventional wisdom is that China can copy but not create. 
That's going to go too."

--Jason Dean, Gordon Fairclough and Ellen Zhu contributed to this article.

--------------------------------------

The New York Times
July 31, 2006

Market Place

Japan Makes More Cars Elsewhere 

By MARTIN FACKLER

TOKYO, July 31 -- Hitting a milestone, Japanese carmakers produced more 
vehicles abroad than at home for the first time last fiscal year, an industry group 
announced Monday.

The 12 car and truck makers in Japan, which include Toyota, Honda and Nissan, 
built 10.93 million vehicles at their overseas factories in the year ended 
March 31, according to a report by the Japan Automobile Manufacturers 
Association. That compares with 10.89 million vehicles that they produced in Japan, the 
group said.

The milestone indicates that the longtime strategy of Japanese auto makers to 
globalize production is paying off. More important, the trend will probably 
continue, and analysts say the pace may even be stepped up.

Analysts also said the figures reflected a recent scramble to increase 
production in China and grab a foothold in the world’s fastest-growing major car 
market as well as their strong sales in the United States, where Toyota, Honda 
and Nissan have all expanded production. 

At the same time, local production helps Japanese carmakers shield their 
revenue and profits from currency swings and helps them tailor designs to local 
tastes. 

As growth in China and elsewhere in Asia continues, Japanese carmakers are 
well positioned to move in, and their rapid expansion plans, which bring jobs 
and tax revenue to the localities, have made Japanese automakers welcome 
investors in many countries. 

Japan’s production expansion abroad also reflects how the industry has 
changed from the 1980’s and early 1990’s, when Japan’s surging auto exports were a 
source of bitter trade disputes with economic partners like the United States. 
The first Japanese car plant in the United States was Honda’s factory in 
Marysville, Ohio, which opened in 1982.

Since then, Japanese production has expanded on every major continent. 
According to 2005 figures, the most recent breakdown from the Japan Automobile 
Manufacturers Association has 4.08 million vehicles made in the United States, 3.96 
million in Asia, 1.55 million in Europe, 645,000 in Latin America, 226,000 in 
Africa, 135,000 in Australia and 10,500 in the Middle East. 

While Japanese companies have been building cars overseas for decades, it is 
only in the last few years that they have essentially ended their reliance on 
cars and major car parts exported from Japan.

Analysts said the figures also reflected the robust global demand for 
fuel-efficient Japanese cars at a time when General Motors and Ford had seen big 
losses on their North American operations. As companies like Nissan and Honda earn 
a majority of their sales and profits from overseas markets like the United 
States, they have been building more cars abroad to be nearer customers, 
analysts said.

“Japanese carmakers are going where their business is,” said Koji Endo, an 
analyst for Credit Suisse First Boston here. “It’s a natural decision, given 
that their growth these days is all overseas.”

Analysts say carmakers began stepping up overseas production in the 1990’s as 
a strategy to avoid trade-related criticism by reducing reliance on exports, 
and by becoming large investors and employers in the markets where they sold 
vehicles. 

More recently they have expanded local production for economic-related 
reasons, analysts said. Local production helps shield prices and profit margins from 
swings in value between the yen and the dollar and other currencies. It also 
allows them to cut shipping costs.

The savings have become crucial as all carmakers have come under intense 
pressure to lower prices even as the cost of raw materials like steel and rubber 
has risen.

The figures released Monday also gave a glimpse of the growing popularity 
abroad of Japanese cars, whose fuel efficiency has won consumers as the price of 
gas has passed $3 a gallon in the United States and is even higher in other 
countries. 

The Japanese industry association said production at Japan’s overseas plants 
jumped 10.6 percent from the previous year. That contrasts with production at 
domestic plants, which rose only 3 percent amid stagnating sales in Japan.

Overseas production continued to show strong growth in the most recent 
quarter, the industry group said, rising 13.5 percent during the three months ended 
June 30, to 2.72 million vehicles.

The initial resistance to Japanese auto investment is also fading. Even in 
America’s industrial heartland, where Japanese cars were once smashed as symbols 
of lost jobs, local governments now compete to attract the foreign 
automakers. 

With the Big Three closing plants and shedding jobs as they restructure, the 
Japanese are still building factories.

For instance, Honda chose Greensburg, Ind., as the site for a $550 million 
assembly plant after state and local governments offered tax and other 
incentives worth $141 million.

The factory, which starts production in 2008, is in addition to 17 factories 
already owned by Japanese vehicle makers in the United States that built 3.4 
million vehicles last year, according to the Japanese industry association. 

Japanese carmakers have been even more aggressive in China, where they have 
33 factories, mostly joint ventures with local companies, the industry 
association said. The association’s figures did not break out China, but showed that 
Japanese companies built 4.2 million vehicles in all Asian countries last year. 
Thailand has been a big production base for Japanese car companies, which 
have also begun expanding in India.

Japanese companies are also using more locally made parts, analysts said. 
Japanese car plants used to be little more than assembly lines, slapping together 
parts imported from Japan. This earned the Japanese criticism for hording 
their best technology at home, and using foreign workers as low-skilled labor. 
But in recent years, cost pressures have driven Japanese companies to buy more 
and more parts from local makers, whose proximity to the plants allows them to 
deliver products cheaply and quickly, analysts say. 

While cars made in developing countries like China still tend to be largely 
assembled from Japanese parts, autos built in more advanced markets like the 
United States now often contain 80 percent or 90 percent local parts, analysts 
said. 

“Japanese car companies still protect their top products,” Mr. Endo of 
Credit Suisse said. “But over all, they’re like other international companies now.”

-----------------------------------------

Asia Times/Asia Pulse/XIC
Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Investors ride China's theme park craze 

BEIJING - It seems simple enough. As their wallets start to bulge more and 
more, the 1.3 billion Chinese need a place to go for entertainment. That goes 
some way 
to explaining the current investment craze in themed amusement parks across 
China. 

A new wave of investment in China's theme parks is on the way, as the 
following five years are expected to be rosy for China's amusement parks and 
attractions industry, according to the International Association of Amusement Parks 
and Attractions (IAAPA). 

There are now at least 2,000 theme parks in China, although the industry only 
started about 20 years ago. Most were joint ventures between the government 
and private sector and were built up in economically developed regions such as 
Beijing, Tianjin, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta. 

Domestic investors are planning a number of new parks in the country. For 
example, the historic town of Zhouzhuang on the outskirts of Shanghai is planning 
a US$40 million park with 5,000 years of Chinese culture as its theme. 
Construction is scheduled to begin at the end of 2006 and is expected to take at 
least one year. 

Meanwhile, the central government has mapped out a plan to spend heavily in 
the Shenzhen area to improve the existing parks so they complement nearby Hong 
Kong Disneyland. The government hopes to market the region as a destination 
called the "Golden Coast", which would feature hotels and activities to keep 
visitors entertained for several days. 

Foreign investors are also vying to inject billions of dollars into building 
up new theme parks across the country. 

A joint venture between Shenzhen Sanguo (Three Kingdoms) Culture City 
Industrial Development and Canada-based Bedford International Financial Group is 
planning a $3 billion park called China Today on Shenzhen's eastern shore, to be 
based on the legend of the third-century Three Kingdoms. The park is expected 
to open in 2010. 

US-based Walt Disney Co is negotiating with Shanghai's municipal government 
to build a theme park in the city's Nanhui district, to open in 2010, 
coinciding with the city's World Expo 2010. Shanghai's Jinjiang Park is also in talks 
with US company Triple Five about a project to expand and reinvent the park, 
according to IAAPA officials. 

At the opening of the IAAPA Asian Expo 2006 held in Shanghai recently, IAAPA 
president and chief executive officer Charlie Bray said the "explosive" 
development of China's theme parks has seen the country emerge as a driver for the 
Asia-Pacific region, which is set to enjoy the fastest growth of this industry 
in the coming five to 10 years. 

"The Asia-Pacific is clearly an emerging market for the amusement park and 
attractions industry," he said. "I think the future growth of the region will 
largely depend on China and India." 

According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report, "Global Entertainment and Media 
Outlook", revenue generated from theme parks in China is expected to grow 
7.1% annually to reach $1.8 billion in 2010, up from $1.3 billion last year. 

The performance in Hong Kong is even better, with the opening of Hong Kong 
Disneyland in 2005 and the redevelopment of its Ocean Park. It expects an annual 
growth of 21.8% to reach $362 million in 2010 from $135 million in 2005. 

Meanwhile, the Asia-Pacific region is expected to generate an average annual 
revenue growth of 5.9% to reach a total income of $8.2 billion by 2010. 

The number of visitors to theme parks in Asia is expected to hit 278 million 
in 2010, up 18.8% from 234 million last year. 

However, the report also pointed out that investments in many theme parks in 
China are not successful. The poor performance of these parks was attributed 
to a lack of major reinvestments. 

China's amusement parks and attractions industry is already plagued by 
repetitive investments from local governments, said Liu Jingwang, deputy executive 
president of the China Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. 

"If you go to any medium-sized and large-sized cities, you will find a theme 
park that is built up or under construction. I am kind of worried, what do we 
do with so many amusement parks?" 

Local governments should therefore carefully evaluate the market and control 
the scale of investment to avoid huge losses incurred by insufficient demand, 
he said. 

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