BEIJING: Once a thriving industrial base, China's north eastern region slipped into depression when several state-owned enterprises shut down in the 1990s as part of economic restructuring.
Still, growth is now slowly but surely returning to the region.
A currency exchange built by the Japanese during World War Two is still in use today in China's northeastern city of Changchun in Jilin Province.
Now home to a bank, the Grecian-style building is a reminder of the city's past, when it was once the capital of Manchuko, a puppet-state under Japanese occupation.
Today, Changchun is better known as China's automobile capital.
But more recently, car sales nosedived following the anti-Japanese protests.
This comes as some major Chinese cities like Guangzhou imposed car ownership restrictions to clean up the air and road conditions.
Chen Werigen, Vice Mayor of Jilin Province, said: "It's impossible we're not affected. But people would now buy cars they like more than before, or cars of better quality and that creates more opportunities for sales. Secondly, we also have a huge rural market that doesn't restrict car ownership. And we're developing new energy vehicles for export. These are the measures we're taking to manage car ownership restrictions in some cities."
But Changchun faces other challenges like the slow growth of private enterprises and poor transport links, with construction of a subway only starting in 2010.
Changchun as part of the northeast was one of the first to industrialise and prosper. But they fell back in the 1990s during the restructuring of state-owned enterprises and hundreds of thousands went jobless.
Things only started looking up after the new millennium when China's central government implemented reforms to revitalise the region.
These include encouraging private companies like Haoyue, China's largest Islamic beef-processing firm by export volume, to set up base.
It now hires 20,000 people at its plant, and accounts for half of China's total exports of beef products to 23 countries, including the Middle East and Russia.
The firm is now diversifying into the production of animal feed, another industry which authorities in the northeast are keen to develop.
Zhang Guohua, CEO of Haoyue Group, said: "For the next five years, we'll increase our investment in animal feed production. The aim is to make us the biggest manufacturer and seller of animal feed amongst the three provinces in the northeast."
And hopefully that will pave the way for greater economic growth in Changchun in the long term.
- CNA/de
