The Rise

Together traditional and hitech industries boost the growth of a coastal city By Lu Yan

At 5: 55 p. m. local time on October 15, 2017, in the city of Olbia on the Italian island of Sardinia, President of the International School Sport Federation, Laurent Petrynka, began opening an envelope containing the winner of the bid to host the Gymnasiade 2020, an international sporting event for young athletes. The meeting room was silent. He pulled a card out of the envelope. It read “JINJIANG 2020.”

Jinjiang, a coastal city in southeast China’s Fujian Province, will become the second Chinese city to host the event after the 11th edition in Shanghai in 1998, its successful bid apt recognition of the city’s development in the past few decades.

“I’m very excited and proud of my hometown,” said Ding Shizhong, Chairman and CEO of Anta Sports, one of China’s largest sports shoe suppliers, having followed the bidding process from start to finish.

Anta Sports was born in Jinjiang in 1991, and has grown into China’s leading sportswear brand with over 10,000 outlets and a market value ranked third in the industry worldwide, after Nike and Adidas. The brand has been both witness to and participant in the city’s growth.

Jinjiang has been called the “City of Brands” for cultivating over 68,000 registered trademarks and 42 of China’s famous trademarks including Anta, and is well known for a thriving private economy. But there is more to Jinjiang than traditional industries. The city is working to upgrade its traditional sectors and nurture hi-tech development.

“We hope that mature traditional industries can serve as a solid base for the development of emerging industries, and