Hangzhou has become a magnet for talent, capital, projects and other high-end elements of entrepreneurship.
Hangzhou was ranked first on the list of Top 20 Chinese cities in 2016. The city of Hangzhou has become a magnet for talent, capital, projects and other high-end elements of entrepreneurship.
According to the latest report of LinkedIn, Hangzhou is among the Top Three cities in China which are most attractive in the eyes of foreigners. In the past three years, over 230,000 overseas talents chose to settle down in Hangzhou and 94 percent of them work in information software, bio-medicine, new energy, energy conservation, financial services, etc.
The legendary Jack Ma is well known in the world, executive chairman of Alibaba and is an iconic figure of Hangzhou city. Jack Ma, , said that Hangzhou was in the past regarded as back garden of Shanghai due to its scenic beauty and comfort of living environment, but now it has become a model of the new type of social and economic development in China thanks to its ever-growing innovation vigor.
The city is China’s first experiment zone of cross-border e-commerce and hosts more than one-third of China’s e-commerce enterprises. According to iResearch, a third-party data provider, 40 percent of China’s B2B trading platforms with annual sales over 10 million yuan are located in Hangzhou.
Like many other Chinese cities, Hangzhou’s growth was fuelled early on in part by manufacturing, development and construction. These are also key drivers of China’s continuing pollution challenge. The consequences of that growth were at least temporarily addressed in the lead-up to the G20 summit.
Zhao Yide, the Chinese Communist Party chief of Hangzhou, said that the city has to break through all obstacles on its way to economic and innovative development and economic transformation.
“We have to speed up the creation of a center for innovation and entrepreneurship, which is based on ‘Internet Plus’ strategy and has global influence, so that Hangzhou can develop into a beautiful international city,” he said.
In 2015, Hangzhou ranked 25th among China’s first- and second-tier cities. A year later, the city had moved up to 20th in the 2016 report, behind best performing city Guiyang in the Guizhou province. Hangzhou significantly improved its categorical ranking on one-year job growth (from 30th to 10th), but did worse in five-year overall job growth (11th to 16th).