Lee plays a short film above the diorama, in which Yujiapu looks sleek, set against a backdrop of pure blue sky--the likes of which you never see in urban China. Twice, the film's voiceover claims that Yujiapu will attract world attention, as we pan over high-rise buildings which will eventually encompass 9.5 million square meters of office space. In Lee's video, the clear sky darkens into a moody purple, and fireworks detonate over China's Manhattan.

A few of Yujiapu's features are originals: an urban park on a whale-shaped island; an underground strip of high-end stores; and China's first three-tier, underground train station, where bullet trains will shoot commuters off to Beijing as well as Tianjin, a nearby boom town of almost eleven million people. It's these links to both China's capital city and one of China's fastest growing cities--not to mention the proximity to China's major port of the north, the Tianjin Port in Bohai Bay--that underpin the local government's confidence in Yuijipu, where 7.6 billion RMB have already been invested.

Right next door, the city of Tianjin is growing at a pace that's staggering even by modern Chinese standards. Tianjin's huge skyscrapers are interspersed with titans still wrapped in green tarps, one of them on its way to becoming the tallest building in China. Down at street level, the city center feels like a construction set: dusty, obstructed, and deafeningly loud. While China has for decades sustained average annual growth rates of ten percent, the province of Tianjin last year reported a growth rate of 17.4 percent. Many predict that Tianjin will spread right into Beijing.

That might explain why a project on the scale of Yujiapu has raised few eyebrows thus far. It falls into the shadow of a city that falls into the shadow of the capital, in a region where seemingly limitless sums of money are pumping.

But much of that funding is borrowed, and recent reports of debt overload is raising red flags over China's most grandiose construction projects, many of which are financed by state-owned banks. Last year, Tianjin topped the national lending charts.

You won't hear about the risks from Vincent Lee, though--only the promises. He expects Yujiapu to quickly follow in the footsteps of Pudong, a former fishing village in Shanghai that exploded with growth in the nineties. When it comes to building cities, Lee argues, the Chinese have a key advantage over the West. In places like London and New York, government planners have to contend with structures of the past. "They are not removing," he says. Here, by contrast, "it's like white paper."

Erased paper is a more accurate metaphor for this peninsula, where hundreds of thousands of native inhabitants were relocated to high-rise apartment buildings that loom beyond the construction zones. Whether these displaced crab fisherman and steel workers will have prime views of China's uber-modern, Manhattan-esque, financial center, or a ghost city whose empty offices tell a sobering tale of overreach, is yet to be seen.

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