Via ZeroHedge:
By Mustafa Zaidi, Research Director at Clarmond Wealth
As Hong Kong was being handed over in early July 1997, my old colleague and I began a series of short visits throughout the Pearl River Delta, from Macau to Shenzen to Canton; all rather sleepy spots relative to the towering buzz of Hong Kong. In Macau there was an unexpected statue of Jorge Alvares, the Portuguese explorer, who arrived here in 1513; he was soon followed a few years later by his colleague Rafael Perestrello, who happened to be a cousin of Christopher Columbus…so strange to think a single family produced explorers that sailed west to America and east to China.
At the end of our visit we concluded that the area had potential but given the lack of transport, communication and legal integration, it would be a very lengthy commitment and we reported back accordingly. It was too long term for the principals.
Today this long integration is on the verge of being complete and it will make the Pearl River Delta, now renamed as the "Greater Bay Area" (GBA), a rival to the great urban areas such as New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo.
To give a sense of the GBA its population is 71m and comprises ten key cities. The ‘Big Three’ are Hong Kong with GDP of $340bn, Shenzhen ($330bn) and Guangzhou ($320bn). The GDP of the whole GBA is $1.5tr. In comparison New York (pop. 20m) has a GDP of $1.6tr, San Francisco (pop. 7m) $800bn, and Tokyo (pop. 40m) $1.9tr.
The GBA is already one of the most valuable urban clusters on the globe and will certainly overtake its cousins. Over the last decade key road, rail, and bridge projects have been completed. Projects include the HK-Zuhai-Macau bridge, the Shenzhen-Zhongshan bridge, and high speed rail from Hong Kong to Guangzhou (the XRL). With completion of the transport and communication infrastructure now in sight, the final step is to bring the two Special Administration Regions (HK/Macau) into a seamless zone, where each city has specialisations: finance for HK, high tech manufacturing for Shenzhen, which is where Huawei is based along with its outlandish European-style campus called Oxhorn, Macau for entertainment, and Guangzhou for shipping; the other smaller cities will grow and find their own "flavor".Related:
The current step by step reduction of HK autonomy needs to be seen through the lens of the GBA, given that HK becomes a smaller component of the regional economy and a very small one of the national economy....MORE
June 2010
"The Slow Strangulation of Hong Kong"
Hong Kong's history over the last couple hundred years is very different from Beijing's.
November 27, 2019
Hong Kong’s Demise
It appears that one of Beijing's options is to let Hong Kong die on the vine and wither away as a business center, with Shenzhen, Shanghai and even Hainan island assuming some of the various roles that Hong Kong has played over the years.
And if HK is no longer an entrepôt and the gateway to China it faces the possibility of becoming a colonial backwater but one that is so overbuilt it ends up as an urban hellscape. Imagine this:...
Sept. 8, 2019
China Experiments with a New Kind of Megalopolis
Speaking of surveillance cities (Shenzhen ranks #2 in the world for CCTV cameras per capita, Guangzhou is #8)
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....
Of course there is always the alternative plan:
— Prometheus 😷 (@PrometheusAM) May 18, 2020
