Over in Shenyang, as of July 31, 8,131 Chinese From page 1 and 53 foreign-invested enterprises have already registered in the zone. The Chinese companies have registered capital of 61.87 billion and the foreign-invested ones $436 million.

Shenyang is one of the three areas of the Liaoning zone, which also includes the ports of Dalian and Yingkou.

The registration center is a hive of activity, with many of those registering businesses seemingly in their 20s.

Yang Fan, a coordinator at the service center, says many young people in Liaoning are attracted to the idea of setting up a business.

"The people who come here are of all age ranges, but a lot of young people leaving college now want to set up their own business. Many don't want to go into a conventional job. They want to do something that interests them," she says.

The parents of some of those registering businesses would have contented themselves to work, often for their whole careers, in one of the heavy industry State-owned enterprises that dominated the province.

Many of these companies are now shedding labor as the economy of the region is being forced to restructure and the FTZ in itself brings hope of a new future.

Bright, clean and modern, and with around 60 employees in smart uniforms, the service center is almost the embodiment of a more modern China.

Yang says the aim is to get away from some of the bureaucratic culture that might exist outside of the zone.

"The important thing here is to have a "cando" culture. If the staff don't know something, they will find out. We find answers for people. We don't say no or any other negative word when we are dealing with people."

Yang Shuo, whose company makes pens for which it subcontracts the manufacturing, studied art design at Shenyang Urban Construction University, says he was impressed with the ease of registering.

"My business is now registered within the zone, although not physically located there. It enables me to take advantage of some of the favorable policies, which include less regulation and tax advantages."

China has seen such zones as central to its economic development since Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up in the late 1970s.

The Special Economic Zones along its southern and eastern seaboard - most notably that in Shenzhen, which started out as a fishing village - effectively kick-started China's march toward becoming the manufacturing workshop of the world.

The new generation of development zones - starting with the much-heralded Shanghai one in 2013 - are intended to propel China to its next phase of development.

Shanghai itself has come in for some criticism for not being quite the laboratory for financial reform it was originally intended to be.

Businesses within the zone, however, have more freedom to make foreign currency exchange transactions and capital account settlements than in the rest of China.

Shanghai also came up with the much talked about negative list which prevented wholly foreign-owned enterprises (WFOEs) in such areas as real estate and manufacturing, although allowing it in new areas like healthcare and other services.

The zone has also been operating at a time when there was pressure on the Chinese currency after a reform of the exchange rate mechanism in August 2015, which has since seen an imposition of stricter capital controls across the whole country.