The city of Jiangmen in South China has started a seven-day tourism festival.

Located in the west of the Pearl River Delta, Jiangmen is one of the nation's key hometowns of overseas Chinese. It is also one of the nation's hottest tourism destinations.

Jiangmen Mayor Wang Nanjian said the aim of the week-long festival is to fortify the city's links with overseas Chinese of Jiangmen origin and encourage more investment in the local tourism sector.

The event has been held annually since 2001 and has been a raging success.

Official statistics show more than 3.7 million people with links to the city now live in 107 countries and regions abroad, making up some 10 per cent of all overseas Chinese.

And investment on their part makes up a very heavy percentage of the city's total.

Jiangmen has over 5,000 overseas-funded enterprises - more than 4,000 of which are backed by overseas Chinese.

They have also made donations totalling about 5 billion yuan (US$602.4 million) over the past two decades, statistics show.

Wang said: "This year's tourism festival is more important than ever. The implementation of the closer economic partnership arrangement with Hong Kong and Macao and the initiation of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao bridge will trigger greater opportunities for our city to make the best of our abundant tourism resources."

Jiangmen raked in a total income of 4.9 billion yuan (US$592.9 million) in 2002, up 11.5 per cent from the previous year, statistics reveal.

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