Head East

 In 1996, when my employer opened it's first factory in Suzhou, the Industrial Park was brand new and still sparsely populated.  At that time, there was nothing around the lakes yet.  The development strategy was to grow from the West - from the edge of the old City - toward the East.  Since we were one of the first to come,  our plant ended up on Western edge of the Suzhou Industrial Park.

 Since then, the park has grown as many other companies have located their factories in SIP.  Walk through a Best Buy or any other electronic store and look around.  Odds are that just about any item you see will have been assembled or will include components from here.  (If that seems like a stretch of the truth, then I invite you to visit and see for yourself.)  In the last 15 years, the construction has marched steadily toward the East as the Industrial Park has filled.  So, when my employer decided in 2010 to build a second factory here, the only available land was some 7 miles or so to the East of the lake - about 10 miles from the older site.

At the beginning of June the project that initially brought me to Suzhou was finished.  But, since I was already here, the powers-that-be decided it was economical to extend our stay until the end of the year... to help with expansion-related projects.  So, since the beginning of June I've moved office to the new factory to the East.  Since the beginning of June, my new best friend has been a 110-foot-long packaging line which we soon hope to be approved for commercial use.

 The photos here show the lands to the East of JinJi Lake.  These are the flat, marshy lands that used to be but rice fields and scattered farming communities.  The land and all it's old occupants have been cleared to await future construction by some Fortune 500 firm.  Lotus plants fill the lowest spots where the water collects.  The old meandering farm roads have been replaced by a modern grid of East-West and North-South boulevards.  In a few places though, like in the photo above, you can still see remnants of the old farmer's roads and bridges.  They could not be force-fitted into the modern plan, but they've not quite yet been erased entirely.

In the mornings, the air smells of malathion.  Mosquitoes, it seems, are not part of the development plan.

I was out to dinner once with a co-worker who was raised in this area to the East of Suzhou.  He is about 35 years old - old enough to have been a child during the pre-boom years of the 1980s.  His parents were local farmers.  He said they were poor.  But so was everyone else around them. So they did not notice it so much.  (This sounds very much like the stories from my parent's generation.)  He also recalled that his parents made him learn to swim before he could go out and play unsupervised. Because of all the water in the area, they refused to let him go out on his own until he was a good swimmer - lest he should fall into a canal and drown.  Another thing he remembered as great entertainment was to walk out to the main road ...and wait there for 3 or 4 hours in hopes of seeing a car go by.  These were the boondocks and cars were rare things in those days.

Today, cars are not so much a rarity it these parts.

This area to the East is the breadbasket of the Industrial Park.  The financial and residential towers are mainly to the West, by the lakes.  Here it is the land of low, two story factory buildings.  There is a chocolate factory across the road from our new plant.  It smells like Willy Wonka Land.  Within the next two or three roads to the East you will find a a good sampling of the world's major pharmaceutical companies. There is a huge Samsung factory at the next intersection to the North.  A huge factory.  They employ more on their cleaning staff than we do in total at our site.  Surrounding it are a couple of quarter sections of land that are covered in cranes engaged in the building of more Samsung factories.   I suppose the smart phones and flat screen TVs and other yet-to-be-seen gadgets of the next decade will come from there.