Manzhouli Port Opening To The World

As an important development strategy, Opening up refers to a country attains to participate in international affairs voluntarily and equally, in exchanging goods, people and information with outside world, under the circumstances of the society becoming more opening and more developed, to achieve its goals of accelerating its development and modernization process.With a land boundary of about22,800km, China is bordered by14countries, most of which are ethnic minority autonomous regions and areas inhabited by ethnic minorities. The development of ethnic regions along national borders, is not only a reflection of the governments1achievements under China’s Opening up policy in30years of time, but also an embodiment of China’s national unity and China’s self-development. The special geographical location of the ethnic regions also relates to the safety of China’s national defense. Therefore, they are of very important strategic position.Located in the northeastern part of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the Manzhouli Port is located in the transportation hub of the Asia-Europe continental bridge, bordering with Russia and Mongolia. As China’s largest inland port, the Manzhouli Port has always been the vanguard of opening up in frontier regions; it has always been an important comprehensive hub of major Eurasian highways; it is a vital economic growth pole along the frontier regions; it is a demonstration area of harmonious progress in border ethnic areas. Since the Reform and Opening up began to implement, especially in1992when Manzhouli was approved by the Chinese State Council to be the first batch of frontier cities to implement the Opening up policy, the Manzhouli Port has achieved rapid developments, which can be said to be the typical representative model of frontier opening-up regions. Therefore, this thesis aims to reflect the common problems of opening up in China’s ethnic frontier regions, by studying the Manzhouli Port’s Opening up results, and provide some new ideas for the development of border port in China’s ethnic areas.The thesis is divided into three parts:introduction, body and conclusion.The introduction includes three components:the summarization of the significance of the topic, the combing of related research trends and main research methods.The body part is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is the historical review and the status quo analysis of Manzhouli’s Opening up. Manzhouli’s Opening up is based on the formation of the Manzhouli Port. The main content of Manzhouli’s Opening up is foreign trade. From the history of Manzhouli’s Opening up, the development process of trade between Manzhouli and Russia (including Soviet Union) is mainly affected by the economic and trade relations between the overall trend of China and Russia (the Soviet Union) and bilateral relations between these two counties. After years of development, the Manzhouli Port’s foreign trade overall presents a growing trend and the ways of foreign trade are gradually becoming diversified, not only due to an important historic opportunity of establishment of an open and developing state key experimental zone, but also due to the steady progress of infrastructure construction of the Manzhouli Port and its continuously enhancement of clearance capacity.The second chapter focuses on the favorable conditions and the existing problems of the Manzhouli Port’s Opening up. The Manzhouli Port’s Opening up has its economic bases, political safeguards and cultural premises:Sino-Russian complementary trade, good Sino-Russian bilateral relations and the Sino-Russian cross-cultural communication and fusion. However, there are still some problems of the Opening up of the Manzhouli Port, for example, the field of import and export products are rather narrow; the level of cooperation between the two sides is not of high standard; the Manzhouli Port’s export capacity is poor and the trade deficit is obvious; trade of enterprises along borders is of small scale, which is weak to resist risks. At the same time, there are deeper constraining factors, such as Russian policies are always changing without norms; Chinese border trade policies are unstable; the level of opening to the outside world is of uncertain under the influence of the Sino-Russian bilateral relations. On the basis of the previous discussion and analysis, the author explores the strategic development of opening up targeting the Manzhouli Port. The author thinks that in order to promote the stability and healthy development of the Manzhouli Port’s Opening up, strategic measurements should be carried out, focusing on three levels of economic trade, politics and culture. Firstly, regional cooperation should be enhanced to boost regional economic and trade exchanges; secondly, intergovernmental relationships should be strengthened to promote political mutual trusts; thirdly, cross-border cultural exchange should be promoted in frontier areas.Russia is the last state visit destination of former Chinese leaders Hu Jintao, Wu Bangguo, Wen Jiabao; President Xi Jinping’s first state visit destination is also Russia. Frequent high-level visits of heads of state to some extent prove President Xi Jinping’s remarks said on his visit to Russia:"Sino-Russian relation is at the best time for centuries. Russia’s’economic sails’need to take on ’the Chinese wind’" the development of the Manzhouli Port’s opening up need to seize the favorable opportunity of the golden period of the Sino-Russian state-to-state relations and the success of Russia’s accession to the WTO, to further obtain better development.