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1977 — present
Not cargo, but the doors cargo walks through: Fort Wayne's formal foreign friendships are recorded in the Communities section; their trade dimension is noted here in one entry. The city holds four sister-city affiliations designated through Sister Cities International — Takaoka, Japan (1977), Płock, Poland (1990), Gera, Germany (1992) and Taizhou, China (2012) — and a friendship-city tie to Mawlamyine, Myanmar (2015), the last a recognition of the Burmese community that had made Fort Wayne its American center. These were people-to-people instruments, built for exchanges of students, teachers and artists, and no trade totals attach to them; but when the city's trade office later ran the foreign-trade zone expansion and its international trade conferences, it was this layer — four standing relationships, one of them with a Chinese manufacturing city adopted the same decade Fort Wayne's own wire and die firms were planting offices in China — that gave the commercial work its civic frame.
Sources:
- Sister Cities International, membership directory, and Fort Wayne Sister Cities International — the four affiliations and the Mawlamyine friendship city.
- Communities — the sister-city relationships and the Burmese community in full, cross-referenced and not retold here.