About Suzhou

Suzhou is a well-known water town in the south of the Yangtze River, with rivers, lakes and tidal flats taking up 34.6% of its total area. Suzhou is nestled in a subtropical monsoon marine climate zone, mild and moist, with distinctive four seasons and abundant rainfall. Known as a land of fish and rice, famous for its silk for long, the city has earned the fame of "the paradise on earth", due to all these attributes.

Suzhou has been farming rice, wheat, rapeseeds, and fruits and producing water crops including lotus root, Gorgon fruit and wild rice stem; the special local produces contain duck blood-black glutinous rice, white garlic, citrus, loquat, Chinese chestnut, plum, osmanthus flowers, Biluochun tea, etc. Dao fish from the Yangtze River, hairy crabs from Yangcheng Lake, silver fish, white fish, white shrimps from Taihu Lake are well-known aquatic products.

Location

A Diagram of the Geographical Location of Suzhou

Situated in the center of the Yangtze River Delta and the southeast of Jiangsu Province, Suzhou is bordering Shanghai to the east, Zhejiang to the south, embracing Taihu Lake towards its west and nestled by the Yangtze River to the north. It has a riverbank stretching 157.96 kilometers along the Yangtze River. The Grand Canal passes through the city from the north to the south, while the Shanghai-Nanjing Intercity railway, the Beijing-Shanghai Express railway, and the ShanghaiNanjing Expressway traverse from the east to the west.

Administrative Division

A Diagram of the Administrative Division of Suzhou

There are four county-level cities that constitute the grand city of Suzhou, including Zhangjiagang, Changshu, Taicang and Kunshan, and six districts, including Wujiang, Wuzhong, Xiangcheng, Gusu, Suzhou Industrial Park and Suzhou New District(Huqiu District).

Urban Development & Public Sector

88.88 billion yuan was spent on infrastructure in 2023. 192 urban renewal projects were implemented.
Suzhou completed the sponge city covering an area of 60.2 square kilometers. The city won the national gold award for urban information model platform. At the end of 2023, the MAN exit bandwidth was 24.2 TB/s. A total of 45,834 5G base stations had been built in an accumulative manner.
By the end of 2023, the total mileage of road reached 11322.2 kilometers. The total operation line of urban rail transit (trams included) amounted to 295.4 kilometers and the operation mileage totaled 34,358,000 train kilometers. The total line and network passenger flow reached 538.799 million. 150 bus routes have been newly opened, optimized and adjusted. The number of motor vehicles in the city reached 5.372 million.
The Shanghai-Nanjing High-speed Railway along the Yangtze River is open to traffic. Rail Transit Line 11 of Suzhou and Shanghai Rail Transit have achieved "seamless transfer". The Xiangcheng section of the Suzhou-Taizhou Expressway has been built as the country's first holographic sensing smart expressway.
The total electricity consumption amounted to 171.93 billion kilowatt-hours in 2023. The total water supply capacity of Suzhou reached 7.525 million ton per day. A total of 4.299 billion cubic meters of pipelined natural gas was supplied in the city. The city's domestic sewage treatment capacity reached 4.7405 million ton per day.

Environment Protection
The average PM2.5 concentration in Suzhou was 30 micrograms/cubic meter in urban areas; the proportion of days with good air quality in the urban area was 80.8%. 95% of the water qualification met the standard of Excellent III in the evaluation at national and provincial level. For the first time, the water quality of the heart of Yangcheng Lake reached Class III. Qiputang River in Suzhou was awarded as China's "Most Beautiful Lake in Hometown". Taihu Lake has achieved a safe summer for 16 consecutive years. With its water quality at the best level in a decade, Taihu Lake was rated as an Excellent Lake by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment for the first time. The ring road around the Taihu Lake was selected as one of the "Ten Most Beautiful Rural Roads" in China.
The newly added and renovated green spaces in urban area of Suzhou covers 2.642 million square meters. 252 pocket parks and small urban green spaces were built in the city. It also witnessed the addition of 12 "near-zero carbon" factories, 2 national green industrial parks, and 18 green factories. In the entire year of 2023, 1,835 VOCs treatment projects were scheduled. The city has achieved a full coverage for the "three fixed items and one superintendent" community in terms of domestic waste classification. And the harmless treatment rate of domestic waste has reached 100% in both urban and rural areas.
Wuzhong District was awarded the National "Two Mountains" Practice Innovation Base and ranked first in terms of GEP among all national municipal districts. Zhangjiagang was selected as the first batch of national demonstration counties (cities) for intensive natural resource conservation.

Three Great Magic Formulas of Suzhou

Dare to be the first

Innovale and excel

Harmony and win-win results

Source: Suzhou Municipal People's Government