Kunshan, reaches Shanghai in the east and borders on Suzhou in the west, is the eastern gate of Jiangsu Province. It was upgraded from a county to a city in 1989. The city area is 927 sq km; and registered population, 650,000. It has under its jurisdiction 10 towns and a State-class economic and technological zone. Kunshan has a long history, and is a birthplace of many famous persons and cultures. Famous thinker Gu Yanwu, educator Zhu Bolu, prose writer Gui Youguang, and “Computer Giant” Wang An are all natives of Kunshan. Kunshan is also the birthplace of Kunqu Opera, the “Grandparent of all Operas”. The thousand old Zhouzhuang, the “No. 1 Town of Rivers and Lakes in China”, enjoys high reputation home and abroad. Kunshan abounds in produce and is world famous for Yangchenghu Brand freshwater crab. It also has the fame of “Land of Plenty”.
Since opening up, Kunshan has bent itself on economic construction, and has started from actual conditions, emancipated mind, innovated and created and seized all opportunities available to make progress. As a result, both economy and society have maintained sustained, rapid and coordinated development trend. The city has successively won the titles of the State Sanitation City, the State Environmental Protection Model City, Quality Tourist City, the State Garden City, the National Ecological Demonstration Zone and the 10 Most Charming Cities in China. Under the leadership of the CPC Jiangsu Provincial Committee, the Government of Jiangsu Province, the CPC Suzhou City Committee and the Government of Suzhou City, Kunshan has concretely promoted construction of a better-off society and swift and good economic and social development guided by the “Three Represents” theory and the scientific development concept. In 2006, the city’s GDP reached 93.2 billion yuan, up 19.4% year on year; fiscal revenue, 15.1 billion yuan, including 6.5 billion yuan of ordinary budgetary income, up 19.2% and 23.1% year on year respectively; import and export volume, 42.75 billion US dollars, up 16.9%; fixed assets investment completed, 28 billion yuan, up 17.9%; per capita disposable income of urban residents, 19,016 yuan, up10.4%; and per capita net income of farmers, 10,508 yuan, up 11%. Kunshan ranks first in the ranking of the Top 100 counties in China published by the National Bureau of Statistics.
2007 is a year when Kunshan witnessed an overall improvement in its construction of a better-off society, as well as a year for the city to promote modernization. Major targets set for economic and social development in 2007 are: GDP grows over 15% to exceed 100 billion yuan while fiscal revenue grows synchronously; the industrial output value reaches 400 billion yuan; the newly approved value of foreign capital contracts registered exceeds two billion dollars, and the amount of foreign capital put in place exceeds one billion dollars; the newly increased amount of private capital registered exceeds five billion yuan; the fixed assets investment grows about 15% to exceed 30 billion yuan; the import and export volume exceeds 50 billion dollars; the total retail sales of consumer goods top 15 billion yuan; the unit GDP energy consumption drops 5%; the per capita disposable income of urban residents and the per capita net income of farmers all grow over 10%; and the registered unemployment rate in urban area is controlled below 3%.
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