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Jiangmen attracts more investment
Jiangmen, ancestral place or hometown to more than 3.68 million overseas Chinese, is on the way to becoming an investment hot spot in South China's Guangdong Province.
According to a China Daily report, the city attracted more than 1,000 entrepreneurs and investors from home and abroad to its three-day economic and technological co-operation fair which ended on Monday with a total contracted or agreed investment of US$300 million.
"Our competitive edge is gradually coming into play following improvements in the city's investment environment," said Jiang Jin, Jiangmen's Party secretary.
He calls the city a prospective communication and business bridge between the prosperous Pearl River Delta and the vast inland market of Southwest China.
Located in the west of the Pearl River Delta, Jiangmen is only a two-hour ride from Guangzhou and Hong Kong.
Four more highways are under construction now and will be put into operation before 2005, linking the city with Yangjiang, Zhaoqing and other cities in western Guangdong.
The city's another advantage is its blood ties with overseas Chinese, whose numbers are close to making up Jiangmen's total population of 3.8 million and who account for one-tenth of all the overseas Chinese the world over.
Besides donations of US$50 million for construction in Jiangmen, the overseas Chinese have offered the city their valuable knowledge and experience to boost its economy.
"It's now time for us to build a modern hometown which the overseas Chinese can be proud of," said Jiang.
Having missed the first investment tide in the 1980s, Jiangmen started to catch up in the 1990s by bettering its infrastructure and offering low-threshold policies.
In the past three years, foreign investment in the city has retained double-digit growth reaching US$840 million last year.
Foreign direct investment had mounted to US$5.5 billion by the end of 2000.
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