Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture Alexis Tam Chon Weng believes that the Outline Development Plan for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA) is providing “a more concrete foundation and a wider platform” for cooperation between Macau and Jiangmen, according to a statement by the Secretariat for Social Affairs and Culture (GSASC) yesterday.
According to the statement, Tam expressed the view during a meeting with Liu Yi, the mayor and deputy secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) committee of Jiangmen.
A spokesperson for Tam’s secretariat told The Macau Post Daily last night that the meeting took place at Macau Tower on Tuesday. The spokesperson said that apart from the bilateral government meeting, the Jiangmen delegation also attended the swearing-in ceremony of the new board members of the Macau-Jiangmen Communal Society. Thousands of Macau residents originate from Jiangmen, a prefecture-level city located some 63 kilometres north-west of Macau.
Jiangmen, which has about 4.6 million inhabitants, is one of the nine cities in Guangdong that are participating in the GBA conurbation project, alongside Macau and Hong Kong.
According to the statement, as Jiangmen is planning to apply for UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) membership, Tam said that the local government would share Macau’s application experience. Tam was also quoted as saying that Macau would help Jiangmen set up a technological innovation platform.
The statement did not elaborate on Jiangmen’s planned UCCN application.
According to the UCCN official website, the UCCN was created in 2004 to promote cooperation with and among cities that have identified creativity as a strategic factor for sustainable urban development. The 180 cities which currently make up the network work together towards a common objective: placing creativity and cultural industries at the heart of their development plans at the local level and cooperating actively at the international level.
Macau has been a UCCN member since 2017.
According to the statement, Tam noted that Jiangmen is a city with great potential, adding that the two cities’ future cooperation was closely aligned with the Outline Development Plan for the GBA. Tam said both Macau and Jiangmen should make use of their respective advantages and jointly promote the GBA development.
According to the statement, Liu said he hoped Jiangmen could strengthen its cooperation with Macau, such as by tapping into Macau’s cultural and linguistic assets and the special administrative region’s special ties with the Portuguese-speaking countries (PSCs), in order to further deepen bilateral cooperation in culture, tourism, education, healthcare, and youth exchanges.
