On November 21st, Xiong Maoping, member of the Standing Committee of the Provincial Party Committee and Secretary of the Municipal Party Committee, met with Jun Sasaki, deputy governor of Iwate Prefecture, Japan, and his party in Dalian. City leaders Li Haiyang and Leng Xuefeng attended.

On behalf of the municipal party committee and municipal government, Xiong Maoping welcomed Jun Sasaki and his party to visit Lian, and introduced the economic and social development of our city. Xiong Maoping said that Dalian, as the leader and window of opening to the outside world in Northeast China, has always placed promoting high-level opening to Japan in an important position. Since signing the Agreement on Strengthening Cooperation between the Two Places with Iwate Prefecture in 2007, the two sides have had close economic and trade exchanges, extensive cultural exchanges and fruitful cooperation results. We are willing to continue the traditional friendship with Iwate Prefecture, establish and improve a multi-level and normalized communication mechanism, further strengthen friendly exchanges between the government and the people, strengthen exchanges between public servants, continue to deepen pragmatic cooperation in transforming and upgrading traditional industries, cultivating and expanding emerging industries, and forward-looking layout of future industries, continuously expand mutual learning in the fields of culture, tourism, education, medical care, environmental protection, etc., enhance mutual understanding among the people, and contribute local strength to China-Japan comprehensively promote strategic and mutually beneficial relations. Dalian will make every effort to create a stable, fair, transparent and predictable market-oriented, legalized and international first-class business environment, create better conditions and provide better services for enterprises and friends from all over the world, including Japanese enterprises and overseas Chinese, to invest, work and live in Dalian, so as to achieve resource sharing, complementary advantages and win-win cooperation.

Jun Sasaki thanked Dalian for its warm reception. He said that over the years, the exchanges and cooperation between Iwate Prefecture and Dalian have continuously achieved new results. He hoped that the two sides would continue their profound friendship, continue to carry out the exchange of public servants, enhance mutual understanding between the people of the two places, promote tourism interaction and product exchange, organize more government cooperation and non-governmental exchange activities, and make positive contributions to the healthy development of Japan-China relations.