Chapter 154: The mayor's son
The incident on the road had a considerable negative impact on Su Licheng's political career. Huangcheng lay in the eastern part of the province and had long been an important city in Southwest China. It was among the second batch of nationally designated historic and cultural cities and a major transport hub in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. With manufacturing predominating, it was one of the province's major industrial cities. Since the implementation of the Western Development strategy, the city had become a provincial pilot zone for comprehensive supporting reforms to coordinate urban and rural development.
Huangcheng was not merely a concentration of processing and manufacturing industries. Because so many of its old industrial districts had been poorly laid out, its air was extremely polluted, and sunlight was absent from the city skies for much of the year. Blue skies and white clouds remained an enduring dream and goal for its residents.
By sacrificing the environment and overexploiting its resources-killing the goose that laid the golden eggs-Huangcheng had achieved net municipal fiscal revenue of 5.6 billion yuan in 2002, according to figures compiled the previous year. That firmly secured its position as second in the province after the provincial capital, Rongcheng, leaving the other cities far behind. But once revenue from government land transactions was deducted, its underlying fiscal revenue offered no advantage over surrounding cities in the province. At less than one billion yuan, it would fall four or five places in the rankings of the province's prefecture-level cities.
This was precisely the problem Huangcheng urgently needed to address. Sacrificing resources and the environment brought pollution at an enormous cost, yet its underlying economic structure remained stagnant. It could still sell land now, but what would remain once all the land had