Nanjing

Nanjing has the highest ratio of college students to total population of any large city in China, the fifth-largest scientific research output of any city on earth, and 68 institutions of higher learning — yet most people know it only as 'that other Chinese capital.' The city that has served as capital for ten different dynasties and the Republic of China now produces more knowledge per capita than almost anywhere else in Asia.

The name means 'Southern Capital,' a complement to Beijing's 'Northern Capital,' and the rivalry is the story. Nanjing was the seat of the Ming dynasty when the Yongle Emperor moved the capital to Beijing in 1421 — a decision that relegated Nanjing to perpetual second-city status for six centuries. The Republic of China made it the capital from 1927 to 1949, and the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 during the Japanese occupation remains one of the most devastating wartime atrocities in modern history. Each of these disruptions destroyed physical infrastructure but could not destroy the city's institutional density: the universities, the research labs, the administrative expertise.

Nanjing's GDP reached ¥1.85 trillion ($255 billion) in 2024, growing at 4.5%. Services dominate at 60% of GDP — finance, culture, and tourism lead — but the real story is the manufacturing base underneath. The Port of Nanjing is China's largest inland-river petrochemical transfer port, feeding refineries like Yangzi Petrochemical and Jinling Petrochemical whose ¥10 billion+ upgrade projects are underway. Huawei, Samsung, Foxconn, LG, and Bosch all operate here. The Jiangbei New Area is purpose-built to attract semiconductor manufacturers, and the city ranks third nationwide in National Science and Technology Awards.

R&D spending targets 4% of GDP — double China's national average. Nanjing University ranks in the global top 10 on the Nature Index. The city ranked fifth globally in the 2024 Nature Index science cities and ninth in the Global Innovation Index clusters. This concentration of research capacity is not accidental; it is path dependence from a thousand years of being the place where Chinese intellectual life chose to root itself, again and again, despite repeated destruction.

The biological parallel is regeneration — like a starfish regenerating from a severed arm, Nanjing has been burned, bombed, and conquered more than almost any city on earth, and each time rebuilt around the same institutional core. The universities are the stem cells.