And you said there’s going to be three hospitals?
Yeah, three hospitals here, plus a proton therapy center.
That’s me getting a tour of a massive new city being built from scratch
and it kind of feels like I’m in a real-life version of SimCity,
that computer game I played as a kid where you could design your own city from the ground up.
But this is real.
It’s located in Southern China but it’s actually somewhat of a partnership between China and Singapore.
It’s called, Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City, or SSGKC.
Yeah, it’s a mouthful.
In the next 20 years, the countries project it will have a population of 500,000.
A whopping figure considering the farmlands here were formerly home to just 40,000 residents.
Pretty much everywhere you look, you’re going to find cranes.
And what’s really interesting is how quickly this city has grown.
Just eight years ago, this entire area was farmlands.
Five years ago is when the development really started to grow and the city began building up.
And it has its own train network, too. You have a train station which just opened a couple of months ago
which will ultimately connect to Guangzhou.
Then you have a bus depot over here which is expected to open soon as well.
Guangzhou is China’s third largest city, right behind Shanghai and Beijing.
It’s about a 45-minute drive from this so-called, Knowledge City,
which recently connected its own underground train system to the massive network of trains in Guangzhou.
The government is relocating farmers to high-rise buildings within the area
and encouraging these new companies to hire and retrain them.
Knowledge City is being built in phases. It’s started with phase one which is built for about
80,000 people across a little more than two square miles.
But it'll eventually cover nearly 50 square miles, that’s almost the size of Pittsburgh.
The first phase has dedicated land to residential and industrial space, along with amenities and green space.
This phase alone will have 18 schools.
Even architects and developers don’t have that open canvas that you’ve had this past 10 years,
what is that like to be able to just build a city from scratch?
We have a sense of achievement, although it is not achieved through myself,
it's achieved through a team of people. The Singaporeans know how to build a city.
Here’s how the joint partnership between the two countries works.
It’s a 50-50 joint venture between China’s Guangzhou Development District Administrative Committee and
Singapore’s Ascendas-Singbridge which is owned by two companies wholly-owned by Singapore’s Government.
By converting these farmlands into a modern city,
the idea here isn’t just to create an economic hub for commerce and research,
but also create a model that could maybe even be applied in rural areas elsewhere in China and beyond.
It was also selected as one of China’s Smart City Pilots cities,
where it can be used to test things like cloud computing and the internet of things.
We are trying to build a new city rather than an industrial park.
We are building a new city that we can live, work, learn and play.
Yet China itself has brought hundreds of million people out of poverty in a few decades and
and is now building new skyscrapers, trains and airports at an unprecedented rate.
What can Singapore offer that China can’t do itself?
Small is beauty.
I think at a micro level, Singapore does have experience of how to manage a midsize or small-sized city
so I think we can offer some of our experience to China.
It’s encouraging some companies in Singapore to set up shop here.
This area is what’s known as the Singapore Manufacturing Innovation Center.
There are about eight startups right now from Singapore that are working out of here
hoping to grow and scale their companies within China, the only catch?
The company has to be Singaporean.
It’s creating individualized hubs for industries like healthcare, biotech, advanced manufacturing,
and even a hub just dedicated to intellectual property.
Many of the companies are pharmaceutical, biotechnology companies, you can see all these.
I can’t see but I'll take your word.
All the biotech companies.
China has a massive population of 1.4 billion, compare that to Singapore’s 5.6 million,
that means China's population can be attractive to tap into a much bigger market.
So this is a Singaporean biotech company that’s set up shop here in Knowledge City,
partially just to access a bigger population for its testing.
But how can this once rural area and still mostly vacant, appeal to young tech talent
that tends to flock to skyscraper hubs like Singapore, Hong Kong, Shenzhen or Guangzhou?
We are trying to appeal to them that if you come to the southern part of China, or the bay area,
this is your first choice, because where can you find a place
where you are well looked out after by us, as well as Enterprise Singapore.
So we try to make the pitch to them in that way.
And it’s not just pitching them.
It’s adding incentives, too. Like massive subsidies and free office space
for everyone from startups to Fortune 500 companies that meet its criteria.
Even offering to pay for things like an IPO application and providing IPO coaching and legal assistance.
In November 2018, Knowledge City was upgraded to a state-level project
so now each country is appointing a Ministry and Minister to watch over its development.
Singapore is China’s largest foreign investor.
And this isn’t the first time Singapore has ventured into a partnership like this in China.
It’s also done similar projects called Suzhou Industrial Park, which started in 1994,
and Tianjin Eco-City, started in 2008. Both are still in progress.
And now, building a city that will eventually be called home to half a million people,
well, it’s an investment in the very long term.
And knowing if it succeeds or not probably won’t happen anytime soon.
We intend to do it in the next 20 years.
So, it is a long project, I will retire before that.