Why China's richest man is building Hollywood of the East in Qingdao

The majority of those people outside China who have heard of Qingdao associate the city with beer. In 1903, German and British settlers founded the Tsingtao Brewery there, and a Teutonic influence can still be seen in some of the architecture in the older parts of town. But the city's temperate climate and coastal setting, almost 560km north of Shanghai, lend it an atmosphere that more strongly recalls southern California, an association lately reinforced by the new buildings going up on the coastline southwest of town.

There, on a steep green hillside that overlooks the Yellow Sea, you'll see a gigantic sign with white freestanding characters: , which translates literally as "Eastern Cinema." It's like the Hollywood sign that has overlooked Los Angeles since 1923, only bigger.

On a sprawling 500-hectare site at the foot of that hill, a gaggle of construction cranes is noisily building Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis, a vast development that includes a film studio, a theme park and entertainment centre, a 4,000-room resort-hotel complex, a shopping mall, a 300-berth yacht club, a celebrity wax museum and a hospital. The Dalian Wanda Group, China's biggest commercial real-estate developer and the world's largest owner of cinemas, has committed US$8.2 billion to the project. Wanda Studios Qingdao is the linchpin of the new development and, when it opens its doors in April 2017, it will be one of the largest and most technologically advanced feature-film-production facilities in the world, encompassing 30 sound stages; an enormous, temperature-controlled underwater stage; a green-screen-equipped outdoor stage that's still larger, at 56,000 square feet; a permanent facsimile of a New York City street; and much more.

Last year, we went to see the project and get a better sense of the ambition of the man behind it: Wang Jianlin, the 61-year-old founder and chairman of the Wanda Group, who is frequently described as the richest man in China. As we drove around the rock-strewn, half-constructed site, we came across a set featuring a life-size segment of the Great Wall. A small army of extras was practicing scenes for The Great Wall, starring Matt Damon and directed by Zhang Yimou, the filmmaker who staged the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The movie, which will be released in November, is the largest Chinese-American co-production in history, with an estimated budget of US$150 million. Its financiers include the state-owned China Film Group; Universal Pictures; and Legendary East, the Beijing-based division of the Hollywood production company that helped bankroll Jurassic World, Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, Inception and more.

Wang wants to make such collaborations routine - and to eventually create one of the world's premier entertainment companies. It may sound like folly. For all the strengths of China's economy, the country has made few successful forays into high-end, globally competitive creative industries. And the government's censorship would seem to limit the creative freedom that the film industry demands. Yet it is hard to dismiss a man with Wang's talent and track record. The enormous bet his company is making in Qingdao mirrors investments made in manufacturing across China in the 1990s and early 2000s. It isn't that hard to envision filmmaking coming to resemble the making of iPhones - with design in California and production in China. But Wang's ambition is larger: he wants to create a cultural platform that is in every sense Hollywood's rival.