The two-day Northeast Asia Green Development Forum concluded on the 18th in Mohe, Heilongjiang. At the forum, the "China Characteristic Town Investment Fund," initiated by the China Development Finance Promotion Association and other organizations, was officially launched. The total investment scale it is expected to drive in the future is projected to exceed 500 billion yuan. Let's take a closer look.

 

　　It is understood that the China Characteristic Town Investment Fund will adopt a fund-of-funds structure. The parent fund has a total scale of 50 billion yuan, with funding support provided by the China Development Bank. The total investment scale it is expected to drive in the future is projected to exceed 500 billion yuan, reaching the trillion-yuan level. It will mainly invest in various types of characteristic towns focused on health and elderly care, leisure tourism, culture and sports, and specialty agriculture.
　　The National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development recently announced the first batch of 127 recognized Chinese characteristic towns. According to a notice jointly issued by the three departments, China will cultivate about 1,000 distinctive characteristic towns by 2020. At present, the biggest problem facing the construction of characteristic towns across the country is the funding bottleneck. Take the Daxing'anling region of Heilongjiang, a key national state-owned forest area, as an example. After the country completely halted commercial logging of natural forests on April 1, 2014, resolving the funding gap and promoting economic transformation became the top priorities in town construction. The entry of the fund into characteristic towns is in fact an exploration aimed at solving the funding bottleneck in small-town construction.
　　Jia Yumei, Secretary of the Daxing'anling Prefectural Party Committee of Heilongjiang Province: After logging was halted in Daxing'anling, it has been very difficult for us to rely on our own strength to build this town through transformation and development. We want to use PPP projects and the planning and design of projects related to the development of our industries to attract social capital in the future to jointly build such a distinctive Arctic town.