From Yang Bishan’s home at the top of a tower block, one can look out across the port city of Beihai and see the fruits of its town planners’ vision. Beihai’s high-rise buildings are arranged in a neat grid; a trunk road stretches towards the mountains in the distance, connecting Beihai with the rest of Guangxi province and other ports along the coast.

This urbanisation dates from the early 1990s, when Beihai was undergoing rapid growth — soon interrupted by a property crash. But today Beihai is experiencing a renewed boom, spurred by lavish state lending in the wake of the financial crisis.

Mr Yang was born more than 1,000km away from Beihai, where he moved in the 1990s. Over the years he has employed more than 3,000 migrant workers who used to farm the fields around his hometown of Luzhou in the inland province of Sichuan. They have come to work for his company — Beihai Modern Construction. “Many are now Beihai people,” he says.