Forbes, 31 May 2012

Naming rights to sporting stadiums is big business. How about naming a newly minted city? In China’s sparsely populated west, you can do just that. Remarkably, though, the money goes to the namer, not the builder. A recent competition offered prize money of RMB50,000 ($8,000) to whoever provided the best name for a planned city in Xinjiang, China’s westernmost territory. The prize is the brainchild of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a military reservist unit that is seeking private investors for its new city. It has set aside 590 square meters for a forecast population of 45,000 people, located near the city of Korla, 2530km west of Beijing. In much of China, this would barely count as a suburb. But in Xinjiang, a vast oil-rich frontier of mountains and dessert, a small population is spread thinly. Hence the outsized role of the XPCC, a self-sufficient offshoot of the PLA that fanned out from garrison towns in the 1950s.

And the new city’s name? Early frontrunners included Wide Ocean, Poplar Tree and Oasis (Xinjiang is very arid). Corps officials subsequently opened up the contest to online entrants and raised the price money to RMB50,000. The cut-off date was May 23; no word yet on the winning entrant. The XPCC already administers several cities and hundreds of farms and factories in Xinjiang, and has listed some of its businesses on Chinese stock exchanges. It reports directly to Beijing and has its own courts (as does the powerful Railways Ministry). Its new city will have an industrial park, which is being touted to private companies. This sounds like a stretch for investors, but Xinjiang is already on the map. Volkswagen’s Chinese joint venture has begun building a plant in the provincial capital, Urumqi. Behind this business development is a political agenda for a region where Muslim Uighurs erupted in race riots in 2009 against Han Chinese, whose numbers have swelled in recent decades. Unmentioned in the publicity for the new city is exactly who will be its settlers.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmontlake/2012/05/30/how-the-chinese-west-was-won-by-urban-planners/