via baidu.
According to today's Cranberry Eagle, the sister city relationship between Cranberry, Butler County, and Haiyang, China, is almost done, should be complete following a trip by Haiyang officials to western Pennsylvania in September.
[Butler Tourism and Convention Bureau president Jack] Cohen said the sister city project with Hai Yang will bring not only tourism to Butler County, but also potential Chinese businesses looking to expand into the U.S.
“As people get to know us and we get to know them, we build relationships,” Cohen said. “You never know what individuals are looking for.”
Hai Yang chose Butler County and Cranberry because Chinese Westinghouse employees living in Cranberry Township have reported a high quality of life, Cohen said.
Westinghouse is building a nuclear plant facility in Hai Yang, Cohen said.
Haiyang is a city of 658,000 in Shandong province, and is the location of two power plants built by Westinghouse. Cranberry has been pursuing this sister city relationship for a decade; according to the Spring 2010 Cranberrytoday newsletter:
The idea for pairing the two communities initially surfaced at a Cranberry Sunrise Rotary meeting in the spring of 2009. Following his presentation about a visit to China where he met the mayor of Haiyang City, Roger Cranville, formerly with the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, spoke with Township Manager Jerry Andree about Cranberry’s unusually high level of receptivity to international business.The Fall 2009 Cranberrytoday profiled the then-new Pittsburgh China Center and offered some do's and don'ts when meeting Chinese people.
Haiyang’s mayor had been enthusiastic about pairing with a compatible American community, ideally one built on the business relationship already in place with Cranberry, Cranville reported. And later that summer, the mayor wrote to Mr. Andree inviting Cranberry to form a friendly relationship with Haiyang and to exchange visits. It seemed like a promising match, except that Haiyang’s population is 25 times larger than Cranberry’s.
Since the two communities are so different in size and resources, Cranberry determined that the best approach would involve supporting a coalition of locallybased organizations that share an interest in forming a special Chinese relationship – one that would create a more regional form of community pairing.
