The Zhuhai Trade Zone differed somewhat from the Zhuhai Special Economic Zone of Ernst's previous life. The Zhuhai Special Economic Zone had been established so the inland could attract investment from merchants in Portuguese Macau across the water and other regions.
The East African government had no such consideration. It simply wanted a share of the southern Far Eastern market. The reason it chose Zhuhai was that the good locations in the south had long since been occupied by the British and French.
Behind Tangjiawan lay Xiangshan County. Present-day Xiangshan County was roughly equivalent to the Zhongshan and Zhuhai of Ernst's previous life, so its potential was still worth believing in.
That belief was Ernst's alone. In reality, his own people did not quite understand it. Xiangshan was now entirely an inland county town, while the coast was practically all mudflats. Take Tangjiawan, which East Africa had leased to build a port: there were only a few small fishing villages by the sea, and any infrastructure for trade there had to be financed and built by East Africa itself.
But trade in this era was simply like that. The Qing government had opened up the coast for barely more than twenty years, and the good places had long been claimed by Britain and France. Only places like Guangzhou and Shanghai, whose locations were so exceptionally favorable that they could connect to the interior through the Pearl River and Yangtze River waterways—places that made everyone's eyes turn red with envy—could not be monopolized.
Look at Germany in Ernst's previous life. Having arrived late, it could only choose Jiaozhou in the north as its base. To open up the interior, Germany had to painstakingly build railways. Yet by the time they were completed, before it could even warm its hands over them,