Collaboration strengthens Sino-US sister-city relations, forum hears

Diplomats, mayors and civic leaders from both sides of the Pacific gathered in San Francisco for the eighth China-US Sister Cities Summit, renewing their commitment to the subnational partnership that national governments alone cannot forge.

Themed "Shared Efforts for High-quality City Development", the summit drew more than 150 Chinese delegates representing 15 provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities and 12 cities, alongside 160 US delegates from 21 states and 36 cities.

The gathering, held on Friday, featured exchanges on three central themes — green development and urban governance, culture and tourism, and education and youth.

READ MORE: Exchanges to help bolster China-US ties

"Everything depends on meeting each other, shaking each other's hand, looking each other in the eye," Carol Robertson Lopez, chair emeritus of Sister Cities International, told China Daily on the sidelines of the summit.

Gatherings like this one, she said, do something that virtual exchanges cannot fully replicate."When we have gatherings like this, it just seals the friendships that we've developed, in many cases online."

She said that hearing how cities in different countries have approached shared challenges is a form of practical benefit.

"What's really important is just bringing people together," she said. "It's interesting to hear all the different things, and we do get a lot of ideas that we can take back home."

The gathering has grown into a platform for subnational diplomacy since its launch by the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, or CPAFFC, in 2014.

China and the United States currently maintain 50 pairs of sister provinces and states, and 238 pairs of sister cities.

Yang Wanming, president of the CPAFFC, pointed to California and San Francisco as proof of what local investment in the relationship can achieve. California holds more sister-city ties with China than any other US state, he said, and both California and San Francisco have been pioneers in bilateral subnational engagement.

Yang cited two recent developments as an example of the momentum. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie visited Shanghai in April, his first official overseas trip as mayor, and within two months, Shanghai had sent a delegation to San Francisco to attend the summit. "This shows the deep relations between the two cities," Yang said at the summit.

He also highlighted in October the presence of Oregon Senate President Rob Wagner, who had visited China in October and returned to San Francisco for the summit, where he met with representatives from sister partners of Fujian province and Tianjin municipality. These showed the relationship becoming closer through mutual visits and the nature of win-win collaboration, he said.

Joint collaboration

"Through openness and collaboration, our two peoples have continued to write new chapters of friendship," Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng said in a video played at the summit."For China-US relations to keep moving forward, we need not only handshakes between the leaders, but also all social sectors coming together hand in hand."

He said there is still much that China and the United States can and should cooperate on and, leveraging sister-city ties as a platform, the two countries should actively expand cooperation from traditional areas such as economy, trade and agriculture to emerging fields including artificial intelligence, new energy and humanoid robots.

Lurie, the San Francisco mayor, said his city is uniquely positioned to hold this summit. "Cities are where history is lived," he said."Cities are where people build their small businesses, raise their families and form the relationships that cross oceans and cultures."

San Francisco, he said, is home to the oldest Chinatown in North America and one of the most vibrant Chinese American communities in the country.

"For generations, Chinese Americans have helped write the story of this city, shaping our economy, our civic life and our culture in ways that are impossible to separate from who San Francisco is," he said.

It was that history that led Lurie to make China the destination for his very first foreign trip as mayor. His April visit to Shanghai marked the 46th anniversary of the San Francisco-Shanghai sister-city relationship.

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Beyond Shanghai, Lurie emphasized San Francisco's friendship-city ties with Shenzhen and Guangzhou in Guangdong province, where ongoing collaboration spans innovation, trade and education.

Zhang Jianmin, China's consul general in San Francisco, described sister-city cooperation as carrying "tremendous potential as engines of economic growth" and called on both sides to broaden their ambitions as the world changes around them.

The summit concluded with the signing of five cooperation agreements, covering 31 cooperation projects and spanning sister-city partnerships, cultural and tourism exchanges and youth programs.

Contact the writers at liazhu@chinadailyusa.com