Marking the fifth time in China, the 2017 Fortune Global Forum will take place in Guangzhou. Forbes Magazine has dubbed the host city the best commercial city on the Chinese mainland five times in the past six years.
Guangzhou officials said this year's Fortune Global Forum will be the annual event's biggest to date. 152 of the Fortune Global 500 companies will send their global CEOs or senior executives to attend this year's forum.
The Fortune Global Forum, which is held every 16 to 18 months, has grown into “the clearest and most direct window to the global economy” in the two decades since it was established in 1995. It has been held in 13 cities worldwide including San Francisco, New Delhi, Barcelona and Cape Town.
This year’s host city, Guangzhou, is said to be the 40th most competitive city in the world in terms of connectivity, according to Globalization and World Cities ( GaWC), the British think tank on global cities.
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Guangzhou is one of China's most commercially attractive cities because of its openness. About 297 global fortune 500 companies had investments in Guangzhou as of the end of September.
The city is one of China’s most important transportation hubs, and also the sixth largest port in the world. Guangzhou is also a major Internet portal of China. More than 50 percent of the country's Internet connections with the outside world go through exchange infrastructures in Guangzhou.
Such connectivity helped give birth to WeChat. This major mobile Internet application in China belongs to Shenzhen-based Tencent, but the company's entire development team is in Guangzhou.
In line with the spirit of openness, WeChat boasts a mission of "Connecting Everything." Beyond messaging, the app can also handle payments. The company's also working with more than 300 local Chinese governments to let citizens access public services through the app.
VCG Photo
VCG Photo
"People can now register for hospitals or pay for traffic tickets through the app,” said Hu Renjie, deputy general manager of the open platform department at WeChat. “Since 2014, we've started to work with the Guangzhou government. This year, the city's people can pay for subway fares with WeChat Pay."
WeChat has helped Guangzhou earn a place in the global innovation scene. Fortune has announced that one of its sub-forums, the Brainstorm Tech International, will relocate from the US to Guangzhou permanently starting this year.
"Tech driven companies in China will join with tech firms on the Fortune 500 list and discuss the future of innovation globally," said Zhu Xiaoyi, director of Guangzhou's Fortune Global Forum Office.
(CGTN's Yan Yunli also contributed to the article.)