The Guangzhou Metro Corporation

  Guangzhou Metro is the metro system of the city of Guangzhou in Guangdong Province of China. It is operated by the state-owned Guangzhou Metro Corporation and was the fourth metro system to be built in mainland China, after those of Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai.

  The earliest effort of preparation for a project to build an underground rapid transit system in Guangzhou dates back to 1960. In the two decades that followed, the project was brought into the agenda fives times, but ended up abandoned each time due to financial and technical difficulties. Preparation of what would lead to today's Guangzhou Metro did not start until the 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that construction of the first line, Line 1, officially began. Line 1 opened four years later in 1997 with five stations in operation.
  In the late 1980s the local and central governments agreed that a new body be established to create a modern transport system. Urban transport developments had been attempted and abandoned no fewer than five times in the previous three decades in Guangzhou. The planning for the new system in the late 1980s and early 1990s involved expertise from France as well as other areas of China. The Guangzhou Metro Corporation (GMC) was approved and legally established as a large-scale enterprise entirely owned by the Guangzhou Municipal Government and came into being in 1992.