A government delegation from Zhejiang province has gone to Germany, Oct 4 – 8, led by Xia Baolong, the provincial Party secretary.

Xia met with the mayor of the city Hamburg, Olaf Scholz on Oct 5. Xia described the recent G20 Hangzhou Summit as Hamburg will host of the same event in 2017. And he went on to say that since the Summit links both Hangzhou and Zhejiang with Hamburg, they should take the opportunity to increase economic and trade cooperation and encourage contacts between their people for mutual development. Xia also introduced Zhejiang's economic development.

Scholz said that Hamburg can learn from Zhejiang's success with the Summit and improve exchanges and cooperation with Zhejiang.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of sister relationships between Zhejiang and the state of Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, and Xia had a fruitful discussion with its governor, on Oct 6. He spoke about the friendly relations reaching back to 1986, and how the interactions between the two have gotten closer. Xia also showed his expects on cooperating more in the economy, trade, technology, culture and manufacturing.

Xia also attended a signing ceremony for establishing friendship in the famous historic, cultural city of Lübeck, on Oct 6, between it and Shaoxing, in Zhejiang province. He said he hopes the two cities can increase cooperation and relations in the future.

Xia also showed great concern in German's Industry 4.0 plan for automation and data exchanges in manufacturing technology, including cyber-physical systems, the Internet of things and cloud computing.

He then went on to visit several German companies to learn more about their innovative development and transformation in advanced manufacturing and concluded by saying that Zhejiang needs to learn from these German firms and improve its manufacturing and industrial transformations and upgrades.