The 2002 Wangfujing World-Famous Commercial Streets Seminar will open today to publicize Beijing's Wangfujing Street.

The three-day seminar is one of the events to be held during the week-long fifth China Beijing International High-tech Expo starting from yesterday.

Representatives from 14 world-famous commercial streets - such as New York's Fifth Avenue and Paris's Champs Elysees - will be in Beijing this week to discuss opportunities for co-operation with the city's Wangfujing Street, one of China's's most bustling city-centre streets.

The theme of the seminar will be "Business opportunities, communications and development." Representatives are expected to sign the Wangfujing manifesto, which is due to focus on planning, developing and constructing international commercial streets and on exhibitions about world-famous commercial streets.

Seminar officials said the development of commercial streets has recently been challenged in three main ways: the rise of supermarkets and hypermarkets; online shopping, which has dealt a strong blow against traditional retailing; and economic globalization, which has brought foreign capital investment into the Chinese market.

Seminar organizers said Wangfujing aims to become world-famous with the co-operation of such businesses.

Wangfujing Street dates back to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and has been China's most famous commercial street since 1949. It has attracted a raft of multinational corporations, famous chain stores and international management groups after undergoing three major upgrades over the past 20 years.

Fifty-four per cent of visitors to Wangfujing are from other parts of China or foreign countries, according to statistics collected in 2000.

( China Daily May 24, 2002)