Even Chinese local authorities are investing for tomorrow

...And that’s not the end of the story.
At county level, some mayors decided to prepare for the future.
I spent one day in Kunshan, 30 minutes from Shanghai domestic airport.
This small (1,3 million inhabitants) town is the heart of the laptops manufacturing: 40% of the world laptops production  is made in Kunshan).
But they forecast that the vicinity of Shanghai in the long run is going to hurt their cost competitiveness in manufacturing. They made the decision to move all the laptop factories further West, and they set up “Services parks” close to Shanghai. Land is owned by the city in China. Most of the income of cities comes from the sale of land. But in Kunshan, they resisted the temptation to maximize the short term income. They keep the land and rent it at a discount price to attract companies and workers.
They chose to specialize their town in services activities where they could get a comparative advantage on other cities, ie where the proximity of Shanghai would be an asset: one park for high end logistics, one for Headquarters and one for BPO. The goal is to attract white collars from Shanghai, in businesses for which the cost of remaining downtown Shanghai is becoming too high.
The facilities are top technology.

And they built housing for the workers and condos for the managers. I visited one apartment: it has the standards of a western apartment, with one bedroom per person, enough space, Wifi, broadband Internet and IP TV in each room…