Around The Block
Chongqing, also known as “Yu” for short, is a world-famous historic city with more than 3,000 years of brilliant culture. After it became the nation’s fourth municipality (directly under the central government) in March 1997. Chongqing has 40 administrative divisions of district and county under its jurisdiction, covering an area of 82,000 square kilometres and with a large population of 31 million.
Chongqing is the only major inland province in Western China that is connected by four modes of transportation - river, air, rail and land. In the first three quarters of 2021, the municipality achieved 9.9 percent year-on-year economic growth and its GDP achieved nearly 2 trillion yuan (about 313 billion U.S dollars). Chongqing is currently developing its advanced manufacturing capabilities in fields such as aviation, electric vehicles, biomedicine, medical equipment and new materials. In the services sector, finance, logistics, e-commerce, eldercare and healthcare have emerged as key growth areas.
Chongqing is the only inland municipality in China. Significantly, it is the operating HQ of Singapore’s and China’s third government-to-government(G-to-G) project named the China-Singapore (Chongqing) Demonstration Initiative on Strategic Connectivity (CCI) since 2015. Under the G-to-G platform, it covers 4 focused areas, which include aviation, logistics, ICT, and Finance. Thus, Chongqing has become a special attraction for Singaporean businessmen and entrepreneurs as the Chongqing government and corporates will look at Singapore collaboration more favourably!
Chongqing is home to many notable Singapore projects. Examples include Raffles City Chongqing (CapitaLand’s largest investment in China to date), Raffles Medical Group’s first general hospital in China and Sembcorp Industries’ group of power plants (which have a combined capacity of 1,620 MW).