China is experiencing rapid economic growth with concomitant societal, regional and political changes. Such changes open up many opportunities for foreign industrial investment but also allow for widening development differentials within China’s urban industrial and rural areas.

In 2007 University of Basel's Department of Geography/Urban and Regional Studies and the Department of Urban and Regional Planning of Guangzhou's Sun Yat-Sen University agreed on visits to the Pearl River Delta and Switzerland, respectively, and to start cooperating in field trips, field research, especially assistance to Chinese doctoral students coming to Germany and Switzerland and Master's theses for Swiss students who want to study urbanization in China's Pearl River Delta. Since then, 4 field trips to the Pearl River Delta by University of Basel staff and students have taken place.

To intensify and to develop the cooperation between Sun Yat-Sen University and University of Basel and to strengthen the communication and the academic relationship between the School of Geography Sciences and Planning, Sun Yat-Sen University, and the Institute of Geography, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed in 2010.

During field trips the students and staff from the University of Basel were exposed to many ways of how China has been realizing economic potentials in the Pearl River Delta, and how regional development differentials are being dealt with.

On all visits a total of 40 students and staff persons gained an understanding of urban commercial land use and planning in Guangzhou, the changing urban fringe, gated communities of the nouveau riches, State industrialization efforts via special economic development zones, Shunde rural industrial development and economic transition in the Pearl River Delta, border city developments in Zhuhai and Macao, urban and regional development in the underdeveloped areas such as Northern Guangdong’s Danxia Mountains.

During small scale field work of groups of Chinese and Swiss students life of the people in small towns in underdeveloped Guangdong was studies but also in urban villages of Guangzhou itself. The specific Donguan Industrial Model which differs from the Shunde industrial model was experienced where labor intensive industrial forms are omnipresent but also modern high tech complexes the size of a major city are being created out of nowhere (Songshanhu High-Tech Industrial Park). Local economic development from manufacturing to real estate was studied in Zhangmutou Town, urbanization and industrialization of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone with the fourth largest container port of the world was visited (Yantian Harbour), and finally urban development and planning in Hong Kong was examined.