The German Center in Taicang, the third one of its kind in China, offers various services to local German companies, including office room leasing, legal consultation, financial service, and translation. [Photo/WeChat account: taicangdaily]

Taicang's contact with the European country can be traced back to 1993 when the then president of Kern Liebers, a supplier of technical metal parts, established a subsidiary in the Chinese city.

From then on, a significant amount of German companies have come to Taicang, including Schaeffler Group, a manufacturer of automotive parts, Mubea Group, a leading supplier of automobile products, and TRUMPF Group, one of the world's largest providers of machine tools.

A high-end equipment manufacturing industrial cluster, featuring key auto parts, numerical control machines, and medical devices, has taken shape in the city.

In a sign of the growing numbers of Germany companies in the city, it took Taicang 14 years to attract 100 German enterprises (from 1993 to 2007), six years to be home to another 100 such companies (from 2007 to 2013), and only five years to introduce the remaining 100 companies from Germany (2013-2018).