Cork to celebrate tale of two cities with Shangai

BOTH are port cities and both are second cities. Both are home to pharmaceutical, IT and microelectronics industries. And believe it or not, the telephone code for both cities is 021.

But tomorrow, they’ll have one more thing in common when Cork signs an historic sister city twinning agreement with Asia’s economic power base, Shanghai, which has a population of 17 million.

A 140-strong delegation of political, business and education leaders from Shanghai, and Chinese Ambassador to Ireland Sha Hailin, will be in Cork for a series of events over two days to celebrate the signing.

The signing will take place at 4.30pm tomorrow.

Cork Lord Mayor Sean Martin, and Gong Xue Ping, representative of the city of Shanghai, will sign the agreement.

It will be the culmination of two years’ work by the two city authorities.

In early 2004, at the invitation of the Shanghai authority, the then Cork Lord Mayor, Colm Burke, led a delegation to Shanghai.

The group included city manager, Joe Gavin, Cork Chamber of Commerce president, Robin O’Sullivan, University College Cork (UCC) research vice-president, Professor Kevin Collins and the director of the National Micro-Electronics Research Centre, Prof Gabriel Crean.

A spokesman for City Hall said the relationship will be based initially on business, culture, tourism and education.

But he said it also provides a framework to promote cooperation between the two cities.

“This will build on the links already established, which in turn were pioneered by UCC and the following universities in Shanghai - Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and East China Normal University.

“There is already a large number of students in UCC from Shanghai,” the spokesman added.

The arrangement will see the establishment of a network of Cork companies doing business in Shanghai.

A cooperation scheme of schools wishing to develop links with their Shanghai counterparts will also be established.

A programme which saw two officials from the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government spend two months in Cork last year will be repeated this year.

During their stay in Cork they were briefed by most of the State agencies, Cork Chamber of Commerce, UCC and Cork Institute of Technology.

They also met 20 companies with interests in Shanghai.