Chongqing has reason to be proud, but not complacent

Chongqing landscape.[Photo/Icpress]

About a month ago I hosted Joseph, an Australian colleague, in my hometown Chongqing when he was doing a report about robots here. My hospitality, including showing him around the city and feeding him delicious local food, obviously touched him deeply.

“Chongqing people are so in love with their city, right?” Joseph asked me.

I didn’t have to reply to him as he could see how proud I was when I introduced my city to him.

“It is good to be proud of your hometown,” he said.

But I still felt a little embarrassed and realized that I have fallen victim to the Chongqing-is-the-best syndrome.

Like Joseph, many visitors to this southwestern city can immediately experience our straightforward love and pride about almost everything here: the unique landscape, the famous hotpot, the beautiful girls…

Especially when it became the fourth municipality in China on June 18, 1997, separated from Sichuan province and under the direct leadership of the central government, we seemed to gain more reasons to believe “Chongqing is the best city in China".

In the past 18 years, my hometown has really developed on a fast track from a plain hilly inland city into a modern metropolis.

With a double-digit growth rate since 1997, Chongqing’s GDP in 2014 reached about 1,500 billion yuan, ($241 billion) 10 times that of 1997, according to the local bureau of statistics.

The urbanization ratio has nearly doubled, from 31 percent in 1997 to 59.6 percent in 2014.