A report highlights the sheer scale of foreign-financed investment into a zone of China that is helping drive a new cohort of wealthy individuals.

Foreign-funded companies have put more than $110 billion of investment into the experimental Shanghai free trade zone, with more than $100 billion of that chalked up to institutional innovation over the past five years, according to the local Shine online news service.

A “negative list,” which restricted foreign investment, has contracted from 190 items in 2013 to 45 this year, the publication said.

New rules mean that commercial banks will be allowed to form asset investment and management companies without any cap on foreign ownership and foreigners will be allowed to take majority stakes in domestic life insurance companies based in the zone.

The developments of such regions coincides with how the wider coastal region of China is becoming a high net worth hotspot. While not without its risks and issues – China remains a Communist-run nation and all that fact implies – the Asian country’s explosive growth can be reflected by how 89 Chinese entrepreneurs became billionaires for the first time in 2017, according to a recent study by UBS and PricewaterhouseCoopers. That is three times more than the 30 who were minted in the US during the same year, or the 34 created in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. China’s market is also young: Some 17 per cent of new Chinese billionaires founded businesses less than 10 years ago; in the US, the comparable share is 7 per cent. To put the figures into a global context, 199 self-made billionaires were created in 2017.