Shanghai Daily news

Yangpu District, which is home to many of the city's top universities, is enlarging its intellectual influence around the Yangtze River Delta Region, including Shanghai, Jiangsu Province and Zhejiang Province.
Recently, the district kicked off 10 projects in the fields of textiles, construction and travel in cooperation with Nantong City, Jiangsu Province.
"We chose Nantong City as our partner because it will become one of the nearest cities in the Yangtze Delta Region to Shanghai when the Sutong Bridge is completed," said Wang Kaifang, director of the district's cooperation office.
The Sutong Bridge, which is expected to be the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world with a central span of 1,088 meters, will make it possible to drive between the two cities in less than an hour. Currently, it takes more than two hours to travel between the two cities by ferry.
Nantong is also expected to narrow its economic gap with some rich cities like Suzhou and Wuxi in Jiangsu Province with the help of its future traffic tie.
"Apart from the convenient traffic in the near future, both the district and the city have many things in common. For example, both of them have a long tradition in the textile industry," said Wang.
"And nowadays, the industry is still very important to them."
Though the textile sector has met difficult times, the two cities still understand the importance of the industry, as the world will give up textile quotas on Chinese goods next year.
National textile manufacturers are expecting to dig out more overseas markets by producing more high-valued products for developed countries.
Yangpu District, treated as one of the cradles of China's industrialization, is trying to develop household textile products. At the same time, Nantong City is planning to restructure its textile industrial chains and develop high-valued products.
During a tour of Nantong, two textile units - Shanghai Textile Research Institute from Yangpu District and Jiangsu Yalun Group Co Ltd, a Nantong City-based textile manufacturer, signed agreements on future cooperation.
"The pursuit of high-valued products makes the manufacturers choose to tie with universities and institutes," said Wang.
Besides the textile industry, Fudan University from Yangpu District will cooperate with Nantong's science and technology bureau to help the scientific achievement from the university be industrialized. Tongji University will join in the research on construction of the Sutong Bridge.
"We hope more and more manufacturers from the Yangtze River Delta Region will set up their R&D centers in Yangpu District, whose universities can help raise the value of their products," said Jiang Zhuoqing, the district's director.
"At the same time, the region will also provide practical places for the district's scientific enterprises and institutes."
Innovation and small office home office zones are being built based on the former incubators or old factories along the district's universities and Huangpu River. The district hopes to become the city's "intellectual center" according to the municipality's blueprint.