Improvements will be made on four fronts. The town will introduce advanced technology into the clothing industry and promote the use of branding to increase value. In addition, it plans to set up a supporting electronic business center to facilitate the e-commerce. It will also establish an Innovation Industry Park in partnership with the China Textile Institute and the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, among other universities, inviting technicians from all over the nation and the world to develop new materials and prestigious designers to make them into comfortable, functional clothes.

He concluded, “Now the per capita annual income in the town has reached RMB 25,000 and that in the surrounding rural area is RMB 13,000. The numbers have been increasing every single year, and will gain more with the growth of our clothing industry. This is how we act on the call of Sun Yat-sen to strengthen people’s livelihood. Keeping the risks of a single-industry economy in mind, we will foster other sectors, particularly the service industry. This accords with the development plan of the Pearl River Delta.”

On October 10, however, all this talk of per capita income and industrial zones must have been far from the thoughts of the passengers who gathered at the Tianzi Wharf for the launch of night cruise of the Qijiang River, the new tourism attraction in Zhongshan. It was from this wharf that Sun Yat-sen departed from his hometown all those years ago in the pursuit of truth, traveling along that very river, and even he couldn’t have dreamed of how his home town would change in the next century and a half.