On November 15th, Vice President Xie Yuan met with the 8-people delegation from the union of Russian Cities (URC) that was invited to attend the 2018 China International Friendship Cities Conference in Wuhan.
Vice President Xie Yuan first welcomed Ms.Alexandra Ignatyeva, General Director of URC, and thanked her for leading the delegation to join in the conference. He said that 2018 and 2019 were designated as the years of China-Russia local cooperation and exchange. Cooperation between the two countries at local and regional level had shown great development momentum and played an increasingly important role in pragmatic cooperation between China and Russia. Especially in September this year, during his visit to Russia, Chinese President Xi Jinping attended a dialogue among regional leaders from China and Russia together with Russian President Putin. Representatives from local governments of the two countries gathered together to share experience and seek common development, and achieved fruitful results. He hoped that the 2018 China International Friendship Cities Conference could also become part of the years of China-Russia local cooperation and exchange, and contribute to comprehensively expanding and deepening local exchanges between the two countries.
Ignatyeva expressed her thanks for the invitation to the conference. She pointed out that as a high-level platform, the 2018 China International Friendship Cities Conference provided a wide range of chances for cooperation among local governments of different countries. At present, more and more Russian cities want to cooperate with Chinese cities, and she hoped that through joint efforts, the two organizations could enrich and improve the local exchange mechanism between China and Russia. Ignatyeva also proposed that the two organizations jointly held a Sino-Russian Cities Forum during the first half of next year in Yekaterinburg of Russia, and discussed relative details such as the number of participants and conference agenda with Xie. Xie showed strong support for Ignatyeva’s proposal and hoped that URC could send written materials in time for further communication.
Photographed by Gao Yuan
