Kaohsiung, March 9 (CNA)
Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu shared Fridayher city's development experience following its merger with the former Kaohsiung County with officials of the Japanese city of Osaka.
Meeting with Osaka Governor Ichiro Matsui and Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru during a six-day visit to Japan, Chen said finding a balance in development among the different regions in the city was important.
The meeting was under the spotlight because Chen was recently appointed acting chairwoman of the main opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Hashimoto has proposed a plan to merge the current Osaka Prefecture and Osaka City into Osaka Metropolis, a move that is expected to be completed in 2015.
Chen said Kaohsiung's development centered around its harbor prior to the merger, after which its area expanded from 153 to 2,946 square km and its population increased from 1.52 to 2.77 million.
Since the merger into a special municipality, the city government has been working to eliminate differences between the city's urban and rural areas and to promote fair development of each of its districts, Chen went on.
The goal of land-planning should be to establish multi-core regions instead of concentrating resources in one single area, Chen added. Furthermore, she added, the central government has to give local governments a lot of autonomy. Osaka could face similar issues in its process of implementing a merger, the Kaohsiung mayor said.
Chen also invited the two Osaka officials to the 2013 Asia-Pacific Cities Summit, which is scheduled for Sept. 16-20 in Kaohsiung.
Also during her Japan visit, Chen attended the Foodex Japan food trade show in Tokyo and donated Kaohsiung-grown bananas to an elementary school in Sendai, a disaster zone of the March 11 earthquakethat devastated areas of northeastern Japan.
(By Wang Shu-fang and Kendra Lin)
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