Fantastic. I live in Dalian, and have done for around 10 years. The city has changed - that's why I dropped an alternate career - to see what newspapers were

Fantastic. I live in Dalian, and have done for around 10 years. The city has changed - that's why I dropped an alternate career - to see what newspapers were writing about in the mid-2000s, about China's rise. Dalian is not unique in this respect. Cities across the seaboard and a select few more inland are all doing the same thing. But is it a bubble? Yes, it is, but in a strange kind of way. 10 years ago there was one software park with around 12 buildings and a local college. Now, that software park has 30+ buildings, and there are an additional 3 software parks located further from the city center all larger than it. The industrial development zone was a road with a bar district and a few 24 hour restaurants (many nearby factories operate round-the-clock shifts), a couple of hotels, and several large lots filled by largely Japanese corporations. Now it is a city of 1 million+ itself, a city on the edge of the city. 10 years ago there were also a lot of empty buildings, all of which are now full. When you visited you probably noticed a lot of high-density housing near the newer office and industrial districts. The local government makes around 1/2 of its revenue (highly trusted word of mouth) from land sales to developers, who in-turn make their profit from the workers that fill these hugely subsided commercial buildings, including the cost of the subway and subsidising busses. What's the core driver for this? Jobs for educated people from rural areas who have no hope nor desire to work on the farm or in the rural town. Their family will invest all they have on ensuring their child 'makes it' with a stable job at a big-name company in a clean city. As long as the jobs are coming, the city is sustainable. For Dalian, a lot of jobs have stopped coming over the past 1-2 years (4-5 years ago was boom-time, especially in BPO and ITO) and construction considerably slowed, but these are cyclical. Somewhere else a city is allowing companies to enjoy lower taxes (a lot of incentives in Xi'an, Chengdu, Chongqing for 'soft' jobs where the export is electronic in the form of email and SVN and not hindered by these cities' physical locations), and the boom is happening there, and the city is making money despite the tax breaks it's offering. It's a bubble, for sure, but it's being juggled.