East Zhengzhou rises

"You would never have a harvest worth this much if you kept running farms here," the official said.

The tax revenue generated by the ZND was 4.5 billion yuan in the first four months of the year - as the CBD became home to about 160 banks, insurance companies, securities firms and other financial institutions.

The 15 major banks based in the CBD accounted for 70 percent of all the deposits and 60 percent of all the loans in Henan province.

Forward-looking plan

Zhengdong's development is the fruit of a forward-looking plan that the province formulated a decade ago. Premier Li Keqiang, then the top official of Henan, was the mastermind of the province's overall development plan.

In 2000, Li said that Zhengzhou was not living up to the role it could achieve as a main growth engine for the province, let alone Central China. Zhengzhou should build its eastern side into a new growth engine, Li added.

The original vision was much smaller. As an old military airport was going to be relocated, the city planned to build an industrial park to attract OEM deals from Hong Kong and Taiwan in the empty area.

But this was a game that many Chinese cities were playing at that time. Chances would be slim for Zhengzhou - had it joined the game - to come out a winner because it hardly had an advantage in it, with neither a seaport nor rich mineral resources. This is also why many hinterland cities, including all the other provincial capital cities in Central China, have difficulty distinguishing themselves from one another.

So what the then Henan governor Li wanted was to make Zhengzhou dream a bigger dream. He insisted on a forward-looking plan that would catapult the city into the limelight for a longer span of time.

The new district should build itself into a strategic pivot for not just Zhengzhou, and not just Henan province, but also Central China - and it should have not only some manufacturing and technology companies, but also the kind of industries that the more development there is, the more of it is needed.

It should have a forward-looking design, too. In 2001, Zhengzhou chose, from six bidders at top global design companies, a blueprint by acclaimed Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa.

Zhou Dingjun, a former student of Kurokawa who was then working with him on the Zhengdong project, told China Daily that the architect's ideas for the area were deeply influenced by Eastern philosophy, especially the harmonious co-existence of a modern city's multiple functions.

"The ZND's multi-polar design is Mr Kurokawa's last masterpiece," Zhou said.

Kurokawa died in 2007. Zhou joined the city planning authority and was promoted to deputy director of the ZND administrative committee.

Highlighting services

Having opted to drop out from the game that all others were playing, Zhengzhou decided that its new positioning should bet on the growth of the high-end service industries.