From Der Spiegel, September 6:
Beijing is building a megacity in the Pearl River Delta that it hopes will one day rival New York and Tokyo. This colossal urbanization project is a bold attempt at metropolitan integration -- and perhaps also a plan by the Chinese leadership to keep Hong Kong under its thumb.
At night, when the sky clears, it's not difficult to guess where the bridge leads. The clouds on the other side of the bay glow orange, illuminated by the city of Hong Kong, with its population of 7 million, just beyond the horizon. Another glow can be seen farther north: the high-tech boomtown of Shenzhen, with 13 million inhabitants. There is a third and fourth patch of light in the sky even beyond that: Dongguan, with 8 million people, and Guangzhou, population 15 million.....MUCH MORE
In the haze of daylight, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, modern-day China's most recent gargantuan building project, seems to end somewhere out in the open sea. But it actually spans the mouth of the Pearl River Delta, an area that has grown to become the world's largest metropolitan region. The bridge crosses 55 kilometers (34 miles) of open water and has been designed to last 120 years and withstand the ravages of storms and typhoons. It is a monument to a rapidly rising world power.
Here, in the country's south, is where China's economic miracle began 40 years ago. Small towns became cities and cities became megacities. Some 16 million people lived in the region in 1980. Today, it's home to more than 70 million who, in an area smaller than Lithuania, generate an economic output roughly equivalent to Russia. If the Pearl River Delta were an independent country, it would qualify for membership in the G-20 forum of the world's largest economies.
But Beijing has even greater ambitions. In February, the Communist Party announced plans to expand the delta into a city of cities that will rival the economic might and modernity of the world's major metropolises, like Tokyo, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. Indeed, that is where China drew inspiration for the name of the project: The Greater Bay Area....
