Chongqing is a very large city in south-central China, with a metropolitan-area population of about 12 million. It is most known as the city at the head of the Three Gorges river area, and has a significant amount of tourist attraction from the scenery around the river.
The city's business character is primarily industrial-commercial, thus having the image of a work-horse city, like Chicago in USA. With its strong, competitive work force, and having extensive natural resources nearby, Chongqing has attracted many foreign companies to invest in industrial plants here, which thrive in the healthy business environment.
Chongqing is in the midst of a huge modernization period. Chongqing is targeted by the central government to be a major international economic power. It has spent about $2 billion on infrastructure modernization since 1990, and has been allocated another billion to be spent by year 2008 (not related to the Beijing Olympics). The city has many new, modern bridges across its two rivers, along with their connecting modernized major traffic arteries. In addition, it has just completed building the first line of an urban rail system, which runs through the inner city for about 20 kilometers. The full system, which will take about 10 years to complete, will run throughout the city.
More importantly, there is a large amount of new, modern business buildings. The Jiefangbei district was the first business area to be modernized. Located just one kilometer west of the convergence point of the two rivers, it is about 1 square km, and has all new, modern high-rise business buildings built around a people's walking plaza. The city's nickname is "mountain city", because of the many large hills all through the city. The inner city is bordered by the Jialing River to the north and the Yangtze to the south. This strip is about 5 kilometers long (east-to-west), before the area of separation widens. Being only about two kilometers wide (north to south), it is an easy walk across this area. Since most of the inner city is built on the side of hills, bicycles would have a difficult time getting around (the hills are too steep to climb on bicycle). The result is that bicycles are banned, which makes the streets much less difficult to drive or walk through. This is quite interesting, seeing a large city in China having no bicycles in it.
Once well-known for heavy air pollution, the city has made great strides in improving its air quality. The inner city has mostly been replaced by modern, fuel-efficient buildings. The burning of fuels using outdated combustion systems has mostly been eliminated. Industrial plants have been moved to outlying areas where their fuel systems are modern and efficient.
Recently, Chongqing has been doing significant development of its arts and culture communities. In addition to several older museums and galleries, Chongqing has recently completed the new Three Gorges Museum, which has many displays of the art and culture of this region both in the past and the present.
Chongqing Municipality, home to 30 million people. It's best known as being at the start place of the Three Gorges Cruise that Downstream Sailing. Chongqing is a famous historical and cultural city in China with a long history of more than 3000 years. Chongqing has rich cultural tourism resource. Chongqing, means Double Celebration, named by Emperor Guang zhong of the Song Dynasty 800 years ago. Overlooking the confluence of the Yangtze and the Jialing Rivers, Chongqing is known throughout China as the "Mountain City."Due to its strategic location on the Yangtze River, for over 4,000 years every dynasty has had a provincial capital there, after gaining special municipality status in 1997, Chongqing has become the largest industrial and commercial city in southwestern China and the economic center of the upper reach of the Yangtze.