Southwest China's Sichuan Province recently announced it was launching 480 projects open to outside investors in a bid to help it become one of the country's major economic powers.

With a total investment of US$13.64 billion, the projects cover a wide range of fields, such as natural resource exploitation, transformation of State-owned enterprises, tourism resource development and infrastructure facility construction.

Among these are the further development of Jiuzhaigou a world-famous tourist locale and the upgrading of the Great Wall Iron and Steel Group into the country's largest production base of stainless steel.

Because of the country's Go West campaign, Sichuan has been developing at a rapid pace in the past five years, with its yearly gross domestic product (GDP) continuously surpassing national GDP growth. Its GDP last year was 545.6 billion yuan (US$65.9 billion), an 11.8 per cent increase over 2002. Statistics indicate Beijing-based companies have been the biggest outside investor group in Sichuan since 1991. Its total investment for the past three years reached 11.4 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion), 18.9 per cent of the total outside investment Sichuan has managed to land during the period. Enditem
 
(Xinhua News  Agency  March 20, 2004)