ESL 2 BY TORRE WU

The scholar made the remarks at the International Conference OnYangtze Delta Development 2002 (ICYDD 2002) which ended Sunday in this capital city of east China’s Zhejiang Province.

The delta covers Shanghai, the largest city and economic centerof east China, and parts of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, which are also economically developed.

Thanks to an urbanization rate of about 40 percent, Chen said, the Yangtze River Delta now boasts a gross industrial output valueequivalent to 21 percent of China’s total, as against an area thataccounts for only 1 percent of the nation’s total.

As the urbanization is proceeding at a quickened pace, nine cities along the Shanghai-Nanjing-Hangzhou highway and railway as well as along the Grand Canal, have actually joined with each other. They are now powerful in finance, trade, education, scienceand technology as well as in culture, helping drive up the economic development in the whole Yangtze River valley.

The cities also play an important role in gearing up domestic to overseas markets, attracting foreign capital and pushing forward technological transfer.

Currently, the major cities on the delta including Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou and Suzhou are suburbanizing for further expansion.

Take Shanghai as an example. It is working on a unified development scheme for 100 towns in its suburban areas, as part ofits plan to have some 8 million residents at suburbs outside its outer belt roads, including 6 million of urban dwellers, in 2020.

By then, no skyscrapers will be allowed to be built in new-typeresidential quarters in the areas, from which it will take 15 minutes at most for efficient commuter cars to get to the expressway network of the city.