Prof. Fulong Wu, Dr. Fangzhu Zhang, and Mr. Zheng Wang were commissioned by UK Government Office of Science to produce a review as part of the UK Government’s Foresight Future of Cities Project. The title of the review is ‘An overview of twinning and contact between UK and Chinese cities’. The duration was from October to December 2015.
The review is available here.
The summary of the review is as follows.
The practice of town and city twinning serves many functions in Britain. Whilst twinning between British and European cities is primarily focused on cultural and educational exchanges, the Sino-British twinning relationship emphasises economic collaboration. Relations between British and Chinese cities are often facilitated by a variety of local interest groups such as businesses, educational institutions and community organisation.
The compatibility of the local economies between cities also plays a role in whether economic partnerships can be forged. In addition, national government makes use of twinning as part of their national strategy to create closer economic partnerships between China and the UK. City twinning therefore has become a mechanism for Chinese and British entrepreneurial governments to promote the city and the country as a destination for investment. However, the evidence for economic collaboration so far is fairly modest compared to the numerous twinning relations created, as only few city authorities have been able to generate substantial commercial activities.
Twinning relations, particularly those created in the last decade, have been unable to meet their economic aims, indicating that deeper collaboration requires more times to nurture. In comparison, cities that have been in a twinning partnership for a long time and are involved in a variety of twinning activities such as educational exchanges or sending and receiving delegates, tend to be economically more successful. This finding indicates that a successful economic partnership between Sino-British twin cities needs to be established on traditional values of hospitality, trust and reciprocity which in turn are facilitated through non-economic twinning activities and time. The recent trend of joint Sino-British research degrees and British university expansions into China can be a helpful way to deepen economic engagement, although better coordination between city authorities and universities is required.
