Local Foreign Sister Cities Exchange

With the acceleration of economic globalization and regional integration, more and more exchanges and cooperation have been conducted between cities in different countries. Governments around the world have attached great importance to International Friendship City relationship, which is a major form of inter-city communication. Along with the progress of reform and opening up, China's international friendship city work has undergone a rapid and comprehensive development. Friendship city has become a major channel for local governments to carry out exchanges and cooperation with foreign countries and friendship city work has become a crucial part of local foreign affairs. But owing to the different degrees of opening up, the friendship city development in China is imbalanced. A certain number of problems related to friendship city work needs to be tackled. Strengthening and improving friendship city work to serve both overall diplomacy and city development will remain as a major task for all the local foreign affairs departments.Based on the existing theories about city diplomacy, and taking Huzhou City of Zhejiang Province as an example, the author makes research and analysis on the international friendship city work. The article consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, the author briefs the history and growth of friendship city exchanges both at home and abroad and elaborates on the features, functions, the motive forces and the developing tendency of friendship city work. In the second chapter, the author takes Huhzhou city as the research object, presenting a detailed introduction of the development process, the characteristics and the achievements of its friendship city work. In the third chapter, the author sums up the existing problems of Huzhou's friendship city work, analyses the causes of all the problems and puts forward certain suggestions on improving friendship city work. The author tries to stress the importance of promoting friendship city work under the new situation and help cities in China in seeking measures of upgrading friendship city exchanges through the case study of Huzhou.