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Our special edition features the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Area, or ETown, a modern business area in the southeast suburbs of China's capital city.
An early outcome of China's reform and opening up, ETown has actually been in existence for more than 20 years. Seldom has it had a high profile - neither as a project of grand government ambition nor as one of the new development zones filled with empty high-rise towers.
But this is its beauty: The place with no expensive landmark buildings or annual fanfare has quietly been one of the engines driving the city's technology-led growth.
In fact, until the end of the 1990s, ETown was just a small cluster of early China operations for international companies built on farmland. One of them was a Coca-Cola bottling plant.
The beginning of the century saw the arrival of Nokia, at the time the largest supplier of mobile handsets in the world, which ushered in a string of technology companies.
Until recently the city's young professionals still thought the place not quite a part of Beijing because of its lack of decent office facilities or trendy services ranging from a Starbucks coffee shop to China Merchants Bank branch.
But change can be fast, as it was at ETown. Today it is one of the major attractions in the Chinese capital city for business investors, professionals with valued experience, and middle-class homeowners and consumers.
It has become home to 8,890 companies, some with international and national brand power.
Some 2,600 scientists and engineers with graduate education overseas have become new settlers, leading innovative initiatives in its various companies ranging from bio-tech to cloud computing services.
More innovations bring in more young people, and along with them, more color to ETown's life.
Every workday morning, its main road takes in streams of chartered buses carrying workers for its companies. In evenings, the park facing the administrative committee's office building is filled with activities. During weekends, its Sam's Club, one of only two in Beijing, sees a constant line of customers at every cashier's counter.
A few weeks ago, ETown saw the quiet opening of its first restaurant owned by a young Frenchman.
The development zone covers less than 50 square kilometers, but each square kilometer yields more than 1.3 billion yuan ($209,677) in tax revenues.
In the first half of 2014 amid a general slowdown in China's economic growth, ETown achieved a higher growth rate than the nation's average, thanks in main to the technologies that its enterprises represent.
Tech companies cannot flourish without tailor-made services from the government. And services are precisely what the E-Town officials have been striving to deliver. According to its administrative committee, right now the focus is rendering the help needed by the growing companies with annual sales ranging from 20 million to 100 million yuan - those with the potential to grow into nationally and internationally competitive operations
There is another role that ETown may soon to start to play, as part of the central government's attempt to further the business integration of Beijing, the neighboring port city of Tianjin and nearby Hebei province. The many tech firms based in ETown can help companies in a much wider area build digital capabilities and infrastructure.
Contact the writer at edzhang@chinadaily.com.cn
