HAVING to leave the exciting city of Shanghai behind for a day to visit an industrial park did not, at the outset, seem like a very attractive option.

It was with something of a sense of duty, rather than anticipation, that we set off on the two-hour drive west, to visit the University of Liverpool’s new base in China. How wrong could we have been?

The city of Suzhou is considered a tourist destination for the Chinese, with its mixture of ancient and modern, its beautiful gardens and Venetian canals.

But our destination was the Suzhou industrial park, outside the city itself, which I knew to be a major and booming Chinese centre of hi-tech and digital industries.

Nothing, however, could have prepared me for its scale. You turn off the main highway on to a wide, tree-lined avenue, with modern industrial units on either side of the road, and you think you have arrived.

Twenty-five minutes later, we were still driving down wide, tree-lined avenues, with modern industrial units on either side of the road.

The industrial park is, in essence, a city in its own right, with a working population of more than one million people.

In 1994, when China began building this park in partnership with Singapore, most of the thousands of acres it now occupies were swamps and open agricultural land.

Now it is a gigantic, sprawling industrial power-house, one of the dynamos of the booming Chinese economy.

At its heart is a civic centre built around a massive, man-made lake, with restaurants, shops, a fun fair with a wheel bigger than the London Eye, and a gigantic cultural centre, housing cinemas, theatres and galleries, designed in bird’s nest style by the architect of Beijing’s iconic Olympic Stadium.

And then we come to Liverpool University. A lone educational voice in this hi- tech, futuristic wilderness? Far from it.

Our own facility is one of 10 universities who are establishing themselves, and growing in size year by year, in the Suzhou Dushu Lake Higher Education Town. By the end of next year, 15,000 students will be based in the 11 sq km town.

Liverpool has established this university in partnership with Xi’an Jiaotong, one of the top 10 private universities in China, and, like Liverpool, a highly respected research- led institution.

The new establishment’s full title is the Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, and it is a separate legal entity from both its parent institutions. The University of Liverpool confers its degrees, but the new university will shortly be applying for the power to award degrees in its own right.

At the moment, the university occupies one large building, the foundation teaching building, but, by the end of next year, two more will have been built, at a total cost of £100m.

One of these, an iconic cuboid structure which will be the campus showpiece, will be the administration and science building.

The remaining seven buildings on the north campus of the university are scheduled for completion by September, 2011, to complete the 167,000 sq m development. Then work will begin on the longer-term project to build an equally massive south campus.

So far, there are some 1,350 students on campus, but another 1,200 are to be recruited this year, and, in six years from now, the student body will number some 8,000 to 10,000.

The Chinese government is backing the building of the university, and has also committed £20m towards research equipment.

China’s strategy is clear. Many multi- national corporations are already working in the Suzhou industrial park, but their activity is primarily manufacturing, with relatively small amounts of research and development.