Last September, the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization published a ranking of the planet’s most “innovation-intensive” places. Towns and cities were judged on the number of patents, scientific papers and venture capital deals they produced, relative to the size of their population.The top five featured some predictable names: the US “clusters” of San Jose-San Francisco and Boston-Cambridge, and the UK university cities of Cambridge and Oxford.In fourth place, however, was a Chinese town of fewer than 400,000 people that until quite recently ranked as one of the least prosperous urban centres in its province, and was unknown to most people...