Bay area could develop into ‘three Shanghais’

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, with its abundant urban resources and expectations of future prosperity brought by the Hong KongZhuhai-Macao Bridge, has the potential to turn into a city cluster comparable to three Shanghais put together, Lin Ming, chief engineer of the bridge’s island and tunnel project, said on Friday.

He praised the Hong Kong government for its vision in participating in the project as the city needs such a bridge to maintain its status as a logistics hub and international shipping center.

Lin was speaking at a lecture session in Hong Kong featuring the country’s top scientists, including a lunar exploration engineer and aircraft carrier researcher.

By “three Shanghais”, Lin meant both the geographical and economic size of the future Greater Bay Area. The region will benefit from its superior urban resources, including the well-developed river transport system.

Shanghai covers 6,500 square kilometers; the per capita GDP of its 25 million people stood at almost HK$135,000 last year. Hong Kong is now a 7.35 millionpeople city with a per capita GDP of HK$340,717, according to statistics from the respective cities.

The bridge, expected to open early next year, only connects the east estuary of the Pearl River inside Hong Kong. This showed the central government’s special care for Hong Kong in the massive infrastructure project, aiming to keep the stability and prosperity of the special administrative region intact, Lin said.

Hong Kong’s status as a world-leading port has shrunk as mainland ports including Shenzhen, Shanghai, Ningbo and Guangzhou expanded, Lin said.

In 2000, Hong Kong’s container throughput topped in the world, it was the shipping center for almost half of the country, he said. In 2015, Hong Kong dropped to the fifth place in the world and the fourth in the country in term of container throughput.

340,717 HK dollar GDP per capita of Hong Kong in 2016

Hong Kong cannot lose its shipping center status. Lin thought the bridge provides great benefits for Hong Kong to keep its leading position as a fine port and a commercial hub. “The city should face the changes with change,” he added.

Hong Kong has to find another way out, he said. The SAR has a highly concentrated service-oriented economy, in which financial services, tourism, trading and logistics, and other professional services serve as key industries according to the city’s Census and Statistics Department.

Even with the acceleration the bridge will provide, Lin says Hong Kong has to deal with its labor shortage and make more scientific and technological progress, especially in engineering and infrastructure construction.

The SAR’s current-term administration has laid greater-than-ever policy support on the city’s innovation and technology development. This includes university research funding for no less than HK$10 billion and additional tax deduction on enterprises’ research and development expenditure.

In her Policy Address last month Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor set a goal to double the expenditure on R&D as a percentage of GDP from 0.73 percent to 1.5 percent a year by 2022.