ABSTRACT
Having experience as a Treaty Port for more than a century (1842-1949), then as a small- and medium-sized industrial city under the Soviet-style command economy for three decades (1950-79), and now as an SEZ in China's 'Socialist Market Economy' (since 1980), Xiamen is clearly entering a new stage of development. The challenges it faces are multi-faceted and formidable: dismantling the old central-planning management system in the zone while actively developing commercial links with generally lessreformed organisations in the domestic economy; developing new, mostly foreign-invested industries while restructuring the local outmoded SOEs; implementing the central government's political strategy on national unification on the one hand and fulfilling its own economic need to attract as much Taiwanese capital as possible on the other; combining the duty of following the country's general reform policy with the role of serving as a 'laboratory' for more radical reform experiments.
