An aerial view of the wetland park near Taihu Lake in Suzhou, Jiangsu province. [Photo/Xinhua]

He praised the business environment in Taicang, noting that it is friendly, convenient and approaching German standards of transparency. "There is lots of competition among places in the southern parts of Jiangsu to attract foreign investment, so that already improves the service attitude," he said.

Taicang has become a center of German companies because of its business environment and because of vast improvements in living environment. "The place has changed from an industrial spot with lots of smoking chimneys to a developed area and a very attractive city. Germans have everything they need here. It is a green city," Muller said.

Xiaokang also focuses on ways to achieve economic growth while protecting the environment, as expressed in President Xi Jinping's statement that "clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver".

Achieving strong environmental protection goals is not easy and often requires a trade-off in lowering measured GDP growth and cutting jobs. In 2018, Jiangsu pledged to reduce air pollution. This will entail cutting steel capacity by 17.5 million metric tons and banning new capacity in the steel, coke, primary aluminum, casting cement and glass sectors, and shutting down all independent coke plants near the Yangtze River and Taihu Lake.

An April 2020 research report by the Development Research Center of the State Council concluded: "In recent years, Jiangsu province has been actively promoting high-quality development. It has made significant progress in improving air quality, continuously reducing the total amount of pollutants discharged from major industries and realizing prominent achievements in urban green development, through optimizing structure, emphasizing the key issues, and implementing comprehensive measures.

"At the same time, Jiangsu's economic development is still facing severe challenges of air pollution for a long period of time to come. For example, the difficulty of fundamentally changing the coal-based energy structure in the short term, bottlenecks in green transformation and upgrading of the industry…"

Our group of journalists was able to visit parks and protected farmland that illustrated strides Jiangsu is making to improve the environment and to provide opportunities for its people to experience nature.

The city of Taicang has retained a lot of its territory as farmland, with three concentrated developed areas around the city. We were able to see the Lianghong Wetland Park and the nearby Hongshan Intelligent Farmland, near Wuxi, both of which were designed to protect the area's water quality.

We saw the magnificent new Tangshan Quarry Park near Nanjing and the stunning flowers of Nianhuawan Park in the Mashan National Scenic Area near Wuxi, which give people access to nature.

Building one of the world's greatest industrial centers while achieving all the aspects of xiaokang takes time and effort. Jiangsu is taking big steps and reaching notable successes in this long journey.