Business Traveller (Middle East)
ADVANTAGE ZHUHAI
With its diverse industries, leisure resorts, compact size and strategic location near Hong Kong and Macau, this coastal mainland city boasts plenty of drawcards
Coastal city is prospering from location and industrial diversity
On the 42nd floor of the 330-metre-high Zhuhai Tower, in the reception of the opulent St Regis Zhuhai hotel, an enormous mural occupies an entire wall opposite the reception desks. The mural depicts part of Zhuhai in the early 1900s, showing a beautiful village at the bottom of a verdant hillside. Rong Hong, the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university ( Yale), is strolling away from the town and towards the viewer of the painting. Not far behind him, two children can be seen playing. Behind the town, the ocean is filled with sailboats.
This, one of the hotel staff tells me, is what the area surrounding Zhuhai Tower used to look like, but now it’s unrecognisable when compared with the painting. All traces of the village seem to have disappeared, and the area is now being developed by state-owned enterprise Zhuhai Huafa Group. There are three major hotels ( including the St Regis) in the vicinity, as well as a huge convention and exhibition centre.
“When I was little, Zhuhai was just a very small city, very few people were here, and I could not see a lot of high buildings. It was just like the countryside, but now it’s quite different, especially in this area,” says Angel Huang, marketing officer at the Zhuhai International Convention & Exhibition Center.
The centre’s largest and most prestigious function room, the 4,500 sqm and 12.6-metre-high Zhuhai Hall, tends to be rented for provincial government functions. Even some large multinationals have balked at the expense of renting out this expansive area, PR officer Lehong Chen tells me during a tour.
The centre occupies a footprint of 269,000 sqm and a gross floor area of around 970,000 sqm (split into two phases). It has recently hosted events including The 3rd China-Israel Investment Summit, Walmart’s New Year Celebration Meeting and a FAW-Volkswagen New Sagitar Press Conference.
Zhuhai is now a city of around 1.6 million people, which may seem large but is relatively small by Chinese standards. By comparison, Beijing and Shanghai are home to well over 20 million people each. However, Zhuhai is likely to rise in prominence both in China and internationally in the coming years, due to its integral positioning in the Chinese government’s Greater Bay Area (GBA) initiative. The city also has a unique advantage over the other cities in the GBA: the 55-kilometre Hong KongZhuhai-Macau bridge, opened in October 2018, makes Zhuhai the only mainland Chinese city linked directly to both Macau and Hong Kong by land.
Major industries in Zhuhai include digital information, biomedicine, home appliances, electric energy, petrochemicals, precision machinery and travel, says Harley Seyedin, president of The American Chamber of Commerce in South China. “We can observe from this unique blend that the city is ready to become the dark horse of the Greater Bay Area,” he says.
“Zhuhai is one of those areas that’s been under-utilised – understated. It’s not really been known what its direction would be. They’ve dabbled in every kind of industry you could imagine, but it’s not been the immediate soughtafter focal point for any particular industry. The GBA will change that.”
THE ORLANDO OF CHINA
A major contributor to Zhuhai’s success is likely to be Hengqin, an island to its south that is about three times the size of Macau. Little known outside of China, much of the island now resembles a giant construction site, but its strategic location right next to Macau means it can take advantage of Macau’s lack of spare land by building attractions to lure more tourists over the border.
Billy Chan, director, international affairs office at Macau University of Science and Technology’s faculty of medicine lives in Macau and often observes Hengqin Island when he takes coffee on his balcony each morning. He believes Hengqin has potential, but is definitely still in its early stages of development.
“They have a lot of bricks and mortar and glass and steel, and buildings standing up and half-finished,” he says. “Hengqin is a great spot, it’s really close to Zhuhai. I’m sure the government will give lots of incentives [for development], but I don’t see a lot of activity yet – besides a lot of buildings. It’s like the lights are on but nobody’s home.”
‘When I was little, Zhuhai was just a very small city, very few people were here, and I could not see a lot of high buildings... Now it’s quite different’