Regional cooperation boosts city fortunes as breakthroughs made in transportation

East China's Fujian province is trying to enhance the connectivity of different cities to boost coordinated and integrated regional development.

The province's transportation network has been further improved to boost exchanges among diverse industries and the sharing of resources among regions.

The Fuzhou-Pingtan Railway now under construction, for example, aims to support the construction of Binhai New City in Fuzhou - a cluster for emerging industries including big data and cloud computing - as well as help promote the opening-up of the Pingtan Comprehensive Experimental Area.

Sitting on the islands to the east of Fuzhou city proper, Pingtan is also the closest Fujian region to Taiwan and thus the province's major destination for cross-Straits business cooperation.

The railway stretches about 88 kilometers. When put into operation, it will take only half an hour to travel between Pingtan and Fuzhou.

Officials in Fuzhou said the city will focus on project construction, policy sharing, tourism development and investment attraction to facilitate regional integration between Fuzhou and Pingtan.

Pingtan poured about 63.5 billion yuan ($9.22 billion) into about 50 cross-region projects this year, including high-speed rail stations and an of shore wind-power transmission network.

Xiamen, another economic powerhouse of Fujian, has accelerated its own connections with Zhangzhou, Quanzhou and Longyan, its three neighboring cities.

An expressway linking Zhangzhou and Xiamen is scheduled to be operational later this month. The travel time between the two cities will be shortened to 30 minutes. Officials from Zhangzhou said the city would learn more from Xiamen in various development fields.

Zhangzhou will also provide space for companies in Xiamen to meet their needs in locating new production sites. The companies are mainly involved in industries such as biological medicines and new-energy vehicles.

In 2015, the provincial government approved a plan to build the Xiamen-Quanzhou economic cooperation zone, to benefit both cities' industrial development.

To date, a total of 24 companies have invested about 2.5 billion yuan in the zone, which is expected to produce an annual output value of 7.5 billion yuan, providing about 10,000 job opportunities.

The economic return of the zone will be shared equally by Xiamen and Quanzhou.

Other cities of Fujian also set up cross-region cooperation programs in ecological protection, tourism and other sectors.

Su Dehui, general manager of the Youxi branch of China Youth International Travel Agency in Sanming city, said the annual growth rate of tourist numbers his company received reached about 50 percent on average in recent years.

The western Fujian city of Sanming is known for its fresh air and rich tourism resources, but it has not achieved the fame of other tourism-oriented cities due to a lack of marketing channels, high-end tourism products and support from related industries.

In February 2016, the city established a tourism association to serve the tourism industry in its four counties.

The counties' major attractions welcomed 2.95 million tourists last year, reaping 128 million yuan in ticket revenue, up 18.2 percent and 15.9 percent year-on-year respectively.

Sanming signed an agreement with the neighboring city of Nanping to hold joint promotional events in Xi'an, Wuhan, Guangzhou and Hong Kong last year. Many orders were signed during the events.