Shanghai Expands Cooperation with Friendship CitiesAs part of China's reforms and opening up drive, many big Chinese cities have established and strengthened friendship with foreign cities. Taking advantage of its geographic superiority, Shanghai, a port city and industrial center in East China, has been outstanding in this regard.Yokohama of Japan became Shanghai's first sister city in 1973. Up to now, Shanghai has set up friendly ties with 47 provinces, cities, and states of 39 countries in the world. Over the past 20 years, Shanghai has benefited a lot from the contacts and exchanges with its sister cities. A number of projects in housing renovation, a tunnel through the Huangpu River, urban transport infrastructure, flood prevention facilities, port construction, and the landscape in the city, are all achievements which more or less resulted from the cooperation with friendship cities. A successful case has been the cooperation with Rotterdam of Holland. Experts from Rotterdam started to do research studies for the reconstruction of two communities in downtown Shanghai in 1985. Introducing the design and technology from Holland, the reconstruction has noticeably improved the housing conditions of the residents in the two areas, and protected the previous style at the same time. That has left some precious experience for the local reconstruction departments and companies in housing reconstruction. In another case, Shanghai and Montreal of Canada have conducted successful cooperation in urban facelifting. The two cities have jointly built a garden of Chinese style in Montreal and a "Montreal High Technology Exhibition Hall" in Shanghai. Seeing the attractive gains and mutual benefit from the exchange and cooperation, Shanghai widened the bilateral cooperation with its foreign counterparts, especially in the 1990s. The contacts and exchange have also contributed greatly to the growth of economic and trade relations between Shanghai and its sister cities. The visit to Hamburg of Germany by the then mayor of Shanghai Huang Ju in 1994 forcefully pushed forward the economic ties between Shanghai and Germany. Attending the "Shanghai Technology Exhibition and Trade Fair" in Hamburg then, Huang made wide contacts with German entrepreneurs and people from the science and technology circles. After that, the economic and trade relations between Shanghai and Germany grew rapidly. Now Germany stands at the fifth among the overseas investors in Shanghai. In June this year, Shanghai Automobile Industry Corporation, Volvo Bus Corporation, and Volvo China Limited signed an agreement to build the China-Sweden Shanghai Sunwin Bus Corporation, with a total investment of 97 million U.S. dollars. The joint venture, a result of the cooperation between Shanghai and its friendship cities, is expected to produce 2,000 high-quality buses annually. The local cultural market has also benefited from the exchange with foreign cities. Residents in Shanghai now have all the more opportunities to enjoy foreign performances without going abroad. And local performance groups also have a lot more opportunities to show their exquisite skills to foreign audiences. For example, the Shanghai International Television Festival derived from the Shanghai International Friendship Cities Television Festival in 1986. |
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