Wonder bridge holds the key to our future
The 55-km bridge across the sea that puts Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macao within just one hour’s drive of one another is far more than a jaw-dropping Chinese engineering triumph made of steel and concrete. It will give a huge boost to the economies of the three host cities and ensure that all will enjoy a prosperous future. Equally significant, it will also lead to a veritable feast of job opportunities for graduates wanting to share in the triple-pronged expansion of business it will touch off. One thing is for sure about the flood of workplace vacancies that will open up — the more talented an applicant is, the more likely he or she will be in strong demand. Further, it is plain commonsense that the most lucrative positions will be over the border.
The bridge is a meticulously planned link in the GuangdongHong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area project involving 11 cities in southern China — including Hong Kong and Macao — all of which will be transformed into innovation and technological powerhouses. The project’s daring goal is to create an integrated group of super-smart cities that will rival the United States’ Silicon Valley or Japan’s Tokyo Bay innovation hub.
Reliable sources present during the recent opening ceremony for the bridge say that the man behind the breathtaking project is President Xi Jinping, who during his visit to South China displayed great enthusiasm over the future role of the Bay Area.
Furthermore, in Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, Xi obviously has a devoted believer. She was one of the VIP guests invited to Zhuhai to see the president officially open the structure. Just a day later she was in Beijing to sign agreements for Hong Kong to work closer with the central government on eight different areas including innovation, technology and youth development. Yes, after spending decades in the “too hard” basket, the highly important subject of “youth development” has finally become the business of our government. Let us trust that one of the early actions will be to crack down on the negative mood that is now so painfully obvious among far too many tertiary students.
Let us now turn our minds back 40 or so years and recollect the huge changes to China’s economy that burst across the Pearl River Delta when China opened up to the world. Carefully chosen sleepy towns across the PRD were decreed to be “special economic zones” and quickly expanded into dynamic contributors to the fast growing new scene.
Many of the new businesses that grabbed the Chinese mainland’s offer were Hong Kong companies that invested heavily in setting up a raft of factories across the border. Two of the most obvious attractions were the availability of land on which to build plus the cheap labor to staff the production lines and do the heavy lifting.
Soon the new enterprises snapped up the local reserves of unskilled labor and recruiting missions moved to the cities and large towns adjoining the province of Guangdong, signing up tens of thousands of workers who would be housed in residential quarters built next to the factories.
The biggest and most spectacular of these SEZs was Shenzhen, on the border with the New Territories of Hong Kong. Its main role was to serve as the last station on the mainland side of the Guangzhou-Hong Kong railway line. Every time a down train to Hong Kong ground to a halt there a fierce scramble took part as thousands of passengers humping bags fought to get through Hong Kong Immigration and customs barriers to get into Hong Kong.
Besides passengers these down trains also transported cattle on the hoof destined for the abattoir plus chicken, ducks and other poultry soon to reappear in the fresh meat sections of Hong Kong markets.
Apart from such food items the daily train services brought a wide range of other products bought on contract after Western and Hong Kong buyers spotted them at the annual Canton Fair. This was a fascinating marketplace for a range of exotic Chinese items the rarest and most attractive of which was destined for sale in Europe, the US and across other parts of Asia.
Returning to the Shenzhen SEZ, nobody in his wildest dreams could have guessed its ultimate fate. In the 1960s and 1970s either side of the railway lines was dotted with farmlets peopled with hardworking peasants who nurtured crops with the help of water buffaloes. Suddenly every patch of land was valuable beyond any stretch of a farmer’s imagination.
The Shenzhen SEZ became the scene of unbelievably hectic modernization, its population rocketing up to 9 million-plus, and its remaining pockets of land snapped up to become still more factories or residential estates.
As this frantic expansion and output of products continued apace it became obvious that the Shenzhen SEZ required its own container port, and all eyes settled on a modest little fishing port named Yantian. Its transformation required much more than wharves, cranes and so on — a network of roads and other interrelated infrastructure had to be built. This is nothing really new or different by Shenzhen standards.
You will not be faintly surprised to learn that the Yantian container port is now rated China’s No 2 cargo-handling facility, with only Shanghai handling a larger share of the export market.
The author was a long-time chief information officer for the Housing Authority and the Housing Department and senior editor of leading publications before and after service with the SAR government.