According to those who work there, everything about the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park demonstrates why Singapore, not Hong Kong, has now become China's favourite role model.
Unlike Yangpu, this is the brainchild not of a mere businessman but of a politician - Singapore's Senior Minister and former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew - and is based on a government-to-government agreement.
With 70 square kilometres to develop, it is twice as large as the would-be port on Hainan Island. Instead of being located on a neglected stretch of coast, it is right outside an important industrial city, Suzhou, and within 80 kilometres of Shanghai, along the booming industrial Yangtze Delta industrial conurbation.
According to its deputy chief executive officer, Chong Lit-cheong, these are only some of the reasons it has been successful in attracting the type of hi-tech multinational investment for which China yearns.
'Most of our investors are from the Fortune 500 list or are leaders in their industrial sector,' he says. Five years on, Yangpu has little to show for its efforts but Mr Chong claims that at the beginning of the year the Singaporeans had lured 80 companies, 61 of them involving industrial investments worth US$1.5 billion (HK$11.61 billion).
Although Yangpu had several years' head start, some of the factories in the Singaporean zone are already up and running.