We are standing in a reception room on the outskirts of the western Chinese city of Chengdu, looking at a model of the Tianfu New Area, a hi-tech “science city” of the future.

The room overlooks a winding lake with lots of green landscaping. Our guide explains the model inside, flashing different coloured lights to make a point about the development of the new “smart city” with proposed clusters of buildings nestled into the massive parklands, looking like some mini-country in Europe.

There is a planned station for the fast train from the east of China with another stop to connect the area to the subway in Chengdu, the city of more than 10 million people and the capital of Sichuan province.

“We were hoping to get this area done by 2020,” says Jiang Bin, vice director-general of the CPC Chengdu Working Committee of the Tianfu New Area, part of the local government which is overseeing the development, pointing to one proposed cluster of buildings. “But we want to bring the deadline forward.”

Companies from Europe have already signed up to come to the area, which will also feature a world-class hospital and a government-supported working space for “makers” — the Chinese term for young entrepreneurs.

We have to double-check the figures for the proposed city when it is all done — will it really take in 400,000 to 500,000 people, larger than the population of Canberra? Apparently so.

On the way out we pass a vast area of land under development, bulldozers moving around and buildings under construction in what was once farm land.

There is also a huge convention and trade show building under construction, under a white sweeping roof, which one local Australian says will be the size of 20 Sydney Opera Houses once it is finished later this year.

While Australia talks about innovation, the proposed Tianfu development in western China is a symbol of the billions of dollars being pumped into constant innovation across China.

Former NSW premier Bob Carr, who is leading our delegation, admits to being taken aback by the sheer ambition of the proposal.

“One of the most commanding achievements of the Chinese in recent years has been the narrowing gap between rich coastal cities and the west of China,” says Carr who heads up the Australia China Research Institute, which sponsored a recent trip by Australian journalists to China.

“Chengdu embodies the economic transformation, roaring ahead with double-digit growth figures in China’s west.”

Like the rest of China, the official growth rate in Chengdu has slowed recently but it is still powering ahead above the national average of between 6.5 and 7 per cent.

“It’s not just the scale of the urban achievement,” says Carr. “It’s the quality of it.”

A few days earlier, we were in Beijing meeting a Western ­economist who was predicting the Chinese economy was so overloaded with debt it would come crashing down sometime in the next five years. A hard landing was almost inevitable, he argued, as a result of massive overborrowing by local government entities.

Exactly how much the different levels of government in China have borrowed to finance the country’s development is impossible to know. President Xi Jinping has committed his government to an ambitious growth target of more than 6.5 per cent for political reasons.

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