China, Japan Factor Large in State’s Economy
Published Aug 25, 2008
Gov. Phil Bredesen and Li Weaver attend the Tennessee China Development Center’s opening in Beijing. Trade with China is up 1,100 percent since 2003.
Tennessee’s ties to the Asian economy run in both directions.
The state has opened the Tennessee China Development Center in Beijing while drawing a multi-state regional Consulate-General of Japan to Nashville from New Orleans.
With imports from Tennessee totaling $1.1 billion in 2007, China ranks No. 3 among the state’s trading partners. Japan ranks No. 5, with the value of imports from Tennessee totaling $817 million.
Nearly 700 foreign companies employ some 112,000 Tennesseans. More than a third work for 165 Japanese-owned companies, which have invested more than $11.5 billion in the state and employ 41,000.
The relocation of the consulate to Nashville is one more solid indicator that “for global economic activity in the Southeast, and for Japanese investment in particular, Tennessee is at the center of where those discussions and those investments are taking place,” says Matt Kisber, Tennessee Department of Economic & Community Development commissioner.
Lori Odom, state director of Asian investment, credits Nashville investment banker Ed Nelson, who served as an honorary consul general for more than 15 years, with promoting Tennessee while the Japanese government was seeking a new location.
The office, which opened in January 2008, covers Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi. It will promote cultural exchanges, serve Japanese citizens and businesses and assist Americans in need of visas.
Tennessee will host the 34th annual joint meeting of the Japan-Southeast U.S. Association and Southeast U.S.-Japan Association in October 2010 in Nashville. The associations are made up of leaders in business and government from Japan and eight Southeast states including Tennessee. The organization was created in 1975 to promote trade, investment, understanding and friendship between Japan and the organization’s member states.
Tennessee’s trade with China has grown 1,100 percent over the last five years, the most rapid growth among the states.
In October 2007, Gov. Phil Bredesen opened the Tennessee China Development Center in Beijing. At the same time, the state began working with the Chinese Foreign Loan Office for an exchange of health-care leaders to improve rural health-care delivery in both countries.
That visit yielded other positive results. Knoxville-based Phenotype Screening signed an agreement to sell its equipment to the Chinese Institute of Botany in Beijing. Phenotype makes a small X-ray device used to analyze plant root structures.
Opening the office, says Kisber, “can lay the foundation for what (Gov. Bredesen) and I believe will be decades of bilateral economic activity taking place between Tennessee and China.”
Story by Joe Morris
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