The Second City, Built Eastward

Tianjin is described in the sources as a dual-core city, and the phrase is exact rather than promotional. One core is the old urban area along the Hai River, which reaches the Yellow and Yangtze rivers through the Grand Canal. The other is Binhai, an adjacent new-area urban core east of the old city on the coast of the Bohai Gulf. The two are not a centre and a dormitory; they are two centres with a stretch of plain between them. That geometry explains a great deal about how the municipality is administered, why its airport and port sit where they do, and why a visitor can cross Tianjin without ever seeing the river quarter.

The shift eastward was a policy before it was a place. In 1994 Tianjin began moving its industry toward the coast and developed the Binhai New Area with the Port of Tianjin as its core. In October 2005 the Fifth Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee put the development and opening of the new area into the Eleventh Five-Year Plan and the national development strategy, and in May 2006 the State Council approved it as a national integrated reform pilot area. A coastal zone that had been salt flats and fishing ports was thus given a national role, and the sources describe the new area as sitting at the juncture of the Beijing-Tianjin city belt and the circum-Bohai city belt.

For a place assembled from development zones, Binhai is remembered abroad for one room. In August 2018 Time magazine ranked the Tianjin Binhai Library first on its list of the world's 100 greatest places of 2018. The building is a reminder that a new area needs something other than berths and bonded warehouses to be visited: the library gave the coast a destination that had nothing to do with cargo. The rest of the area's fabric is administrative by design, made up of the economic and technological development zone, an airport economic zone, the Lingang and Nangang industrial areas and the Sino-Singapore Eco-city, each with its own boundary and purpose.