Second home

Ni Ping, from the China General Chamber of Commerce in Chicago and president of auto parts company Wanxiang America, said that the US heartland has become a second home to many Chinese companies, and more will come.

"Despite bilateral relations reaching a very low point, two-thirds of CGCC members have said that they will increase their investment in the United States," Ni said.

"These Chinese companies are exporting billions of dollars of US agricultural products to China, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the US agricultural industry in the Midwest (and) creating a lot of meaningful platforms by which more ideas and information can be shared."

Vice-governors from Hubei and Hebei provinces, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, secretaries of state from Alabama and Iowa, and other US officials and executives from companies such as Syngenta and John Deere also joined the opening session and expressed a desire to see more bilateral cooperation.

Sarah Lande, who hosted President Xi Jinping during his visit in 1985 to Muscatine, Iowa, and Kenneth Quinn, president emeritus of the World Food Prize Foundation, spoke about people-to-people exchanges between the US heartland and China.