Hong Kong youths get chance to learn culture on tour of Sichuan

More than 700 young people from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region started a six-day tour on Thursday in Chengdu, Sichuan province, to learn about the province's culture and the recent developments of the mainland.

The activity was organized by New Home Association, a Hong Kong charity that has brought approximately 9,000 people from Hong Kong, especially youngsters, to visit cities on the mainland since 2015.

On Thursday morning, the group visited the Dujiangyan Panda Park and witnessed the naming ceremony of a pair of newborn twin pandas.

"The twin panda cubs were born this year, and they represent new birth and hope. They are full of vigor and vitality just like the young people here," Zhang Zhizhong, Party chief of China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda, said at the ceremony.

The twins were named "Sihai" and "Yijia". Combining the two names creates a Chinese idiom, meaning "we are a family", symbolizing the continuation of the friendship between Sichuan and Hong Kong.

Xu Rongmao, chairman of the board of the New Home Association and chairman of Hong Kong Shimao Group, a property developer, said: "Young people of Hong Kong can feel the prosperity of the motherland, improve exchanges with mainland people and further promote cooperation."

Junie Li Jun-ying, a 19-year-old student with the Caritas Institute of Higher Education in Hong Kong, said: "What impressed me is that the center has more pandas than Hong Kong."

Li said that she was looking forward to visiting the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's former residence in Guang'an, Sichuan.

Many old people in Hong Kong respect Deng and put up his photo in their homes, she said.

She studied Chinese in primary and high schools and knew of the late leader, a native of Sichuan who contributed greatly to China's reform and opening-up.