Shannon Airport was about to become obsolete, so Ireland turned it into a model China would copy.
In the late 1950s, Shannon Airport on the west coast of Ireland depended on transatlantic flights that stopped to refuel. Advances in aircraft technology were about to make the stopover unnecessary. Planes would soon have the range to fly over Shannon entirely, and the airport, along with the rural economy around it, faced collapse.1
Brendan O'Regan, the airport's director, submitted a proposal to the Irish government. Rather than wait for decline, he suggested converting land adjacent to the airport into a dedicated manufacturing zone with special tax incentives and exemptions from customs duties on imported materials used for export assembly.2
In 1959, the Irish government incorporated the Shannon Free Airport Development Company and established the Shannon Free Zone on roughly 600 acres next to the runway. It was the world's first purpose-built modern free trade zone.3 Companies operating in the zone received a corporate tax exemption on export profits for twenty-five years. Early investors included De Beers and Sony. The zone's success required building Shannon Town from scratch on reclaimed marshland, Ireland's first new town in more than two centuries, to house the workers.4
In 1972, UNIDO organized an international training workshop on export processing zones at Shannon. Delegations from developing countries studied the model and returned home to replicate it.5 India established the Kandla Free Trade Zone in 1965. South Korea opened its Masan zone in 1968. Taiwan launched the Kaohsiung zone in 1966.
In 1980, a team of eight senior Chinese government officials, including Jiang Zemin, participated in a six-week UNIDO study that visited Shannon and five other countries. Their mission reports and recommendations were submitted to the State Council and the National People's Congress, and fed into legislation governing China's first special economic zones, including Shenzhen.6