And therein lies many of the future investment opportunities. Urbanisation requires more developed service industries, such as health care, education, tourism, sports and research. “We lack the financial products to help with urbanisation,” Li said. “We need high-tech development… The commercialisation of new technologies will become more important.” He said that, overall, there were no major challenges threatening growth this year, so it was a good time to work on restructuring the economy. Harvest Global Investments (HGI) is the Hong Kong-based Harvest subsidiary granted a full retail and wholesale international licence by the Government in 2008, along with five others of the original 10 Chinese asset managers. Of the HK subsidiaries of the Chinese firms (China AMC, E-Fund, Bosera), HGI has made the furthest inroads in managing international clients’ assets. These range from European pension funds to Japanese retail asset management funds.

While the industry is still very regulated in China, Michele Bang says, it mirrors other parts of the economy with a trend towards liberalisation. For instance, until last year each asset management firms in China were allowed to launch just two mutual funds per year. This has been relaxed to allow more funds on an asset-class basis. Bang, the chief executive of HGI, is a former chief executive of Deutsche Asset Management for Asia ex-Japan. Deutsche acquired 19.5 per cent of Harvest in 2005 and 11.5 per cent in 2008. A private company, Lixin Investments, owns the other 30 per cent. China will also allow this year the trade in index futures, which will give managers for the first time the ability to short the market.

And the Shanghai exchange is about to launch an international exchange to allow foreign companies to float there. For funds managers in China, tracking government policy driven themes as investment targets is one of the key areas of focus. Janice Dai, Harvest CIO, said there was “huge potential” for urbanisation in China, which was still far below that of most countries. Equity sector allocations this year would be away from last year’s stimulus-linked industries such as construction and infrastructure and towards companies which would benefit from economic restructure, “although some are already overpriced,” she said. The Harvest conference did not escape discussion of the value of the RMB. In his opening address, Li was subtle. He noted that a revaluation would probably boost consumption spending as a proportion of the total, but there were also other ways of doing this.