Xi'an builds hub for modern 'Silk Road'(2)

As it turns out, however, Xi'an has been fortunate despite, or precisely thanks to, its distance from the country's eastern shore.

The city is well-positioned on not only many key transportation lines connecting China's sea ports with its heartland, but also a few important national economic development programs, most importantly the central government's strategic attempt to lead China's economic reform and opening up from its industrialized coastal cities in its more densely-populated eastern regions to the country's vast western regions that lag still behind.

Beijing's another strategic ambition, namely to let more people move into the cities, and arrange for them off-farm jobs, may allow Xi'an, as one of the three existing large cities in West China (the other two being Chongqing and Chengdu), to become a main stage for various business breakthroughs and innovations.

In physical infrastructure, Xi'an is the hub connected with railways to Beijing, eastern port cities like Shanghai, Tianjin, Qingdao and Lianyungang, the southwestern city of Chengdu, and westward, through Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, to access to Kazakhstan and Russia's Far East rail system. Xi'an and Beijing are already connected by high speed passenger train service, the fastest of which takes only about four and half hours for a one-way trip.

For air transportation, Xi'an has an airport that ranks among the top 10 in China.

Overseas, it is connected with major East Asian destinations by direct flights.

In June, it just opened a direct flight to and from Helsinki, its first in Europe. In 2012, it handled 23 million passengers, more than double from 2008, along with 170,000 metric tons of cargo.

The ITL is designed to sit close to Xi'an's all major transport facilities. Part of it is the Xi'an Railway Container Center Station, one of China's 18 rail container hubs designated by the national railway authorities. With some 600 million yuan in investment, the rail container center station started building in September 2008, and is already in full operation from July 2010.

Adjacent to the rail container center station is a bonded zone, an area under the supervision of the customs, where companies benefit from tax breaks and tax rebates.

Jin Wang, operation and sales manager for Tata Steel, said the company manages from Xi'an (based in the ITL) its distribution and delivery services across West China.

West China, mainly Xi'an, Chengdu and Guiyang (Guizhou province), boasts 40 percent of China's aviation industry, and generates regular demand for Tata's supply of special steel materials, Wang said.

With 6 billion yuan (almost $1 billion) in commitment, the building of China South City (Xi'an), a sprawling trade and exhibition center, is perhaps the champion of all investment projects being built up right now in the ITL.

The runner-up may be the so-called Midwest Commodity Exchange Center, a future exchange for metals and coals, whose investment budget is 3 billion yuan.

Nearby, there is the largest trade and distribution center for books and publications in Northwest China, a 1 billion-yuan joint investment project for a Singaporean company and a company based in Shanxi province (to the east of Shaanxi).

A logistics center for pharmaceutical and medical products is still under construction. With some 300 million yuan in planned investment, it also claims to be the largest in Northwest China.

Many items still remain on the developers' map, including the design of a "highway port" for Xi'an and a logistics center for telecommunication equipment and parts. Logistics and trading companies, Chinese and international, are moving into the ITL.

On the construction site of the future China South City, Manager Sha Longzhou reported that part of the future facility was already booked by companies from Central Asian republics.

But of course, the ITL's designed land (44.6 sq km) is far from filled as yet.

Road and subway connections with the Xi'an downtown are either being revamped or being built.

It is only five years since the ITL began transforming from concept into reality.

All that has been done so far is but the prelude to a modern edition of merchants from "ten thousand countries" in Xi'an. The curtain has not risen for the main show as yet.