If Naheed Nenshi thinks he has development headaches, he's just met a man with 20 times the challenges.

Calgary's top civic politician sat down in Beijing with his counterpart Guo Jinlong on Thursday for a brief chance to talk shop.

Amid formal greetings in an ornate hall near Tiananmen Square, Calgary's mayor came face-to-face with the daunting problems confronting a metropolis with almost 20 million people and five million vehicles.

The two mayors of one-time Olympic cities chatted briefly about issues such as expanding urban transportation, energy use and explosive population growth, although the sheer scale of Beijing's challenges came sharply into focus.

While Calgary has been one of Canada's fastest-growing cities in the past decade, Beijing has added 604,000 migrants annually for each of the past five years, the equivalent of adding 10 cities the size of Medicine Hat to its ranks each and every year.

"Six-hundred thousand people a year? I won't complain about our growth challenges for at least two days," Nenshi quipped after the session.

And while Calgarians sometimes lament the wild gyrations in Cowtown's hot-and-cold economy, Beijing's gross domestic product grew by a stunning 8.6 per cent annualized rate in the first three months of the year, Guo noted.

This comes as some 20,000 extra cars are added to the clogged streets of China's capital each month and air quality remains a problem. While Calgary loves its car culture, some reports say China's overall motor vehicle market is increasing by almost 50 per cent annually, suggesting there are no easy solutions for its epic traffic gridlock.

"To be honest with you, we're under huge pressure from a growing population," Beijing's mayor told Nenshi through an interpreter. "Equally for Beijing, it's also faced with the daunting challenge of achieving sustainable development."

Calgary's first-term mayor, who was joined by Alberta Finance Minister Lloyd Snelgrove and several civic leaders in the ceremony, was taken aback by news that Beijing is planning to extend its domestic subway system by 300 kilometres in the next five years through a massive building program to double its track.

Nenshi noted Calgary's new $1-billion west leg of the LRT system is just eight kilometres long.

"I think, wow, we need to move faster," Nenshi told Guo.

Following the sit-down -the first reportedly between a Canadian mayor and Guo -Nenshi said civic leaders around the world share common issues, and he has another meeting next week with the mayor of Shanghai.

"We have to deal with things on a much smaller scale, but we have to deal with an urban fabric that has to absorb significant growth every year," Nenshi said in an interview.

"Urban issues are still urban issues . . . We still have to deal with garbage, we still have to deal with roads and transit, parks and recreation and overall sustainability -that's the stuff that lives at the most basic level of government, and that's what we do.

"Of course, he and I have very different roles -I understand he has a lot of power, and I have one vote on council -but we're still dealing with the same stuff and can learn from each other."

Guo seemed to agree, adding: "It's fair to say there's huge room for us to collaborate in the future."

Before the mayor arrived in Beijing on Thursday, officials with Calgary Economic Development and Tourism Calgary formally launched the weeklong trade mission at a news conference, distributing white Stampede cowboy hats to bemused Chinese journalists and trying to translate words like Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump into Mandarin.

Bruce Graham, CEO of Calgary Economic Development, hopes the trip boosts Chinese investment in the city and extends Calgary's reach into the booming Asian business market, as the country has the second-largest economy in the world.

Direct investment by China's state-owned energy producers into the Canadian oilpatch has topped $13 billion in the past 18 months. The city recently attracted the Bank of China to open a branch in downtown Calgary, and Graham hopes this week's meeting will eventually lure more Chinese financial institutions to Calgary.

"This mission is more of a dooropener than a closer," he said.

"Clearly the environment we're in has changed dramatically for China and Alberta. There's been an awakening, if you will, and we'll just see where that takes us and what those opportunities are."

Tourism Calgary chairman George Brookman also touted the city as a destination for the growing number of Chinese tourists who are venturing abroad, and discussed the possibility of adding direct Beijing-to-Calgary flights in the future. The weeklong trip, which also includes a stop in Shanghai, wraps up Tuesday.