Hangzhou creating'Greenwich-like'hedge-fund hub

In 2013, a group of Chinese journalists visited Greenwich, Connecticut.

They raised questions about the affluent town's economy, growth and cost of living.

It was assumed by many that the visitors were interested in investing in the town 35 miles from New York City and Wall Street. They were wrong.

Their mission was to gather enough information to start replicating in China a financial center similar to that in Greenwich.

On Tuesday, Greenwich, population 62,433, and Hangzhou, population 9 million and the metropolis that surrounds the village community that mimics Greenwich, will celebrate becoming sister cities.

The model community is called Yuhuang Shannan Fund Town, China's first investment management commercial park. The $966.4 million development is scheduled to be completed in 2019. Chinese banks, corporate investment and private investors are financing the project.

Greenwich is about a 40-minute express train ride from New York City and home to 380 hedge funds that manage $350 billion in assets, according to city officials.

The new fund town in Hangzhou - home to China's largest stock exchange - fits within one square mile. Greenwich with its sprawling estates and back country roads, covers 67 square miles.

When the visitors arrived in Greenwich in 2013, First Selectman Peter Tesei said, "Due to the language barrier, it was often challenging to fully comprehend what they were looking to ascertain, but what we did know is they were looking to fully understand what made Greenwich an attractive community for hedge funds and those in the financial realm."

He said that "you can replicate the physical attributes in terms of perhaps neighborhood design but you can't replicate the topography" or "the human community component because of the differences in history and as a society".

In addition to Greenwich, research for the model community also focused on US cities and areas like Seattle, the Silicon Valley area of Northern California near San Francisco.

Bob Ormond, the vice-president and general manager of GX International, a Seattle-based unit of Zhe-jiang Jiangong, accompanied the Chinese journalists to Greenwich.

In an interview with China Daily in 2015, he said the goal was to create a financial center similar to that in Greenwich.

"Their idea was to create a development project that would attract tech and finance companies staffed by Chinese graduates of US colleges like Harvard and Yale," he said.