Beyond the development of the New West, the Dar es Salaam city metropolitan area, the three new major steel industry bases, and the largest integrated road-and-bridge transportation network, during the First Five-Year Plan, the East African government would continue investing in basic industries—energy, minerals, metallurgy, petroleum, chemicals, electricity, automobiles, and others.
"By 1905, East Africa's urbanization rate should rise by two to three percentage points, reaching at least 25 percent. We should strive to surpass the Austro-Hungarian Empire and catch up to France. Our urbanization level is neck and neck with that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but regions within the empire such as Austria and Bohemia possess formidable industrial strength, so we must face the gap squarely. Among the great powers, Britain, Germany, the United States, and France all stand far above East Africa in urbanization and industrialization."
"Therefore, surpassing those four countries in a short time is unrealistic. Of those four, France has the lowest level of industrialization, yet it still exceeds 30 percent, at least ten percentage points higher than East Africa. Such a gap cannot be erased overnight."
After all, by the end of the nineteenth century, industrial development in every country had been advancing rapidly, and France was no exception. From the 1880s to the present, according to information obtained by the East African government, the French government had invested an estimated five billion francs in building domestic infrastructure such as roads, ports, and railways.
Without Germany and the United States as contemporaries for comparison, France's industrialization progress would not have lagged behind that of any country. Although East Africa's industrial scale was growing rapidly, its population growth rate was also high. With the two offsetting each other, the gains did not seem nearly as impressive. France's overall population had changed little, after all, so when