Visit to Discuss City Branding with the Party Secretary of Zhuzhou
My numerous past visits to Hunan province have always been productive and recently, the Party Secretary of Zhuzhou (株洲), Cao Huiquan (曹慧泉) invited me to discuss how the brand of his city could be promoted internationally. This is a city which can be reached in about one hour by car from Changsha and it has considerable manufacturing/industrial capacity.
It is always a pleasure to speak with local politicians about the development of their cities because they know them so well! While interactions with the central government are always more formal and discussions are often conducted in abstract terms, those with officials at the provincial and municipal level always feature specific places, companies and people that are important to their city.
In my discission with Cao Huiquan, I drew a number of parallels between the city of Zhuzhou and industrially developed cities in Eastern Europe. He had previously visited a number of countries in this part of the world and related well to the lessons from their successes and failures. Hopefully, the city of Zhuzhou can learn from the former and avoid the latter!
