The rival down the road.

The article looks at economic competition between the Chinese cities of Beijing and Tianjin. They are excited by a visit paid in late June by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, and his strong endorsement of Tianjin's New Binhai Zone, a decade-old industrial park and port complex that has already attracted billions of dollars of investment from some of the world's biggest manufacturers. The mutual standoffishness between Beijing and Tianjin--both municipalities that answer directly to the central government rather than any province--is also beginning to erode. Or so officials hope. Work has just begun on a high-speed rail link intended to reduce travelling time between the two centers to half an hour or so. Construction of a new expressway between the cities has also just started. Both projects are due to be completed in time for Beijing's Olympic Games in 2008. But breaking down political barriers in the region could take time. Some Chinese scholars argue that creating a "greater Beijing" (in effect bringing Tianjin under the capital's control) would aid regional development. The idea does not go down well in Tianjin. The city's reformist mayor, Dai Xianglong, a former chief of China's central bank, says market forces will help more. Nowadays, he says, state-owned banks would not lend to projects that are simply wasteful duplications of others in the area. If so, that would indeed be a breakthrough for the region's development.