China's Xi Jinping recently declared that he wants China to rank as one of the world's most innovative countries by 2020 and to top the list by mid-century. There's a better model to be found, however, one that's surprisingly close to home: the southern boomtown of Shenzhen. The city's Nanshan district, home to a huge High-Tech Industrial Park, is now China's richest, with a higher per capita GDP than even capitalist Hong Kong, just across the border. Indeed, Shenzhen's rapid success could well be more remarkable than the latter's: Little more than a fishing village in 1979, when Deng Xiaoping decided to launch China's reforms in a special-economic zone there, Shenzhen has since grown into a megacity of more than 11 million people with a GDP five times Macau's. At an average of $727 per square foot, real estate prices are higher than anywhere in the U.S.; the city will soon be home to the world’s fourth-largest skyscraper.

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-12/china-s-shenzhen-has-figured-out-the-future