The eurozone’s political tarantella may still be roiling global markets but some of the world’s savviest investors are already turning their attention elsewhere.

It is not trips to Brussels or Frankfurt that analysts at large and secretive hedge funds are planning in the first few months of 2012, but data-gathering exercises in Shenzen and Guangzhou.

The past few weeks have seen China loom large in the nightmares of many hedge fund managers still smarting from a less-than glory-filled 2011. Concerns are rising for the global outlook over the increasingly negative economic signals emanating from the country.

As the Emerging Sovereign Group, a $1bn hedge fund backed by Julian Robertson and half-owned by Carlyle, one of the world’s biggest private equity groups, told its clients in a recent note: “[We have a] gathering sense that the next act of this rolling global debt crisis may well play out in the East.”

ESG sent a team for a two week “deep-dive research trip” to China in October, an investor told the Financial Times.

“Even though an aggressive stimulus programme allowed China to sidestep a post-Lehman recession, rendering events there, for a time, secondary to developments in the US and Europe, the Chinese economy could soon take centre stage,” the group said.

ESG is a voice to listen to: it is one of the few hedge funds that saw the eurozone crisis coming, and has made its clients a considerable sum as a result. Its flagship fund made 39.6 per cent in 2010 and is up a similar amount this year.

It is far from being alone. “In China, both the official and the HSBC PMI [a reading on manufacturing activity] suffered significant losses in November,” Brevan Howard, the world’s second largest macro hedge fund, with assets of more than $32bn under management, wrote to clients in its latest letter.

“Worryingly, domestic demand was showing the bulk of the weakness according to both metrics.”

Few things, seemingly, cause greater alarm in Mayfair’s converted townhouses or Greenwich’s discreet office blocks than a lack of information. “Reading the economic pronouncements of the Chinese government is like kremlinology,” laments one UK-based hedge fund trader.

Faced with obscure communications, hedge funds such as GLG Partners are hiring their own analysts and intelligence gatherers on the mainland to stand outside factory gates, and, quite literally according to one GLG insider, “count the cars”.

The biggest worry most have of China is not just a manufacturing slowdown, however, but the popping of a massive credit bubble, finding accurate data on which is even more difficult.

In cities like Beijing or Shanghai, apartments are said by analysts to sell for as much as 30 times average annual income. Compare that with just less than six times for the worst-stricken subprime properties in the pre-crash US.

Hugh Hendry, one of the hedge fund industry’s most voluble figures, has long been critical of China’s property boom. It is only recently, however, that a jerky, homemade video he uploaded to YouTube in 2009 has become something of a hit in hedge fund circles.