Suzhou

"Our first hotel in Kunshan was a great success. With that confidence boost, we proceeded to open another one in Suzhou, and then one in Shanghai. By the end of 2017, Hanting had opened 2,244 hotels all over China."

"Apple and Tesla have made a huge effort to train its Chinese workers to manufacture their products—and earned fabulous sums of money by doing so. These stories are replicated in varying degrees across China’s other communities of engineering practice, production hubs for shoes and garments in the eastern city of Wenzhou, medical equipment in Wuxi and Suzhou, and, most wonderfully of all, guitars in the mountains of Guizhou’s Zheng’an County. Overall, China’s manufacturing workforce employs more than a hundred million people, around eight times that of the United States. That is a big stock of people who are fueling the creation of new process knowledge."

"I was much happier to live in Shanghai, where many streets have remained human-scaled rather than being built for cars. The French Concession, where I lived, remains leafy and full of cafés. Shanghai is highly walkable, and one is rarely more than a fifteen-minute walk from one of the city’s many subway stations. Shanghai has vowed to open [120 new parks every year](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor307) until 2025, when the city will reach 1,000 green spaces. The city of twenty-five million people works remarkably well. Like Tokyo, it has flourishing spaces for commerce, where little dumpling shops are tucked away even in subway stations. And Shanghai is superbly connected by high-speed rail to nearby cities—for example, Hangzhou, home to tech companies like Alibaba, and Suzhou, where many multinationals have manufacturing operations—which are themselves some of China’s most successful cities."