China Experiments with a New Kind of Megalopolis
This article feels like it&#x27;s rehashing a lot of stale CPC talking points.<p>I moved to the PRD a few years ago because i am a city nerd. I love urban development and i heard that this was the boomtown of the world. It is a pretty interesting place, but it&#x27;s not as remarkable as it comes across if you live overseas and&#x2F;or only consume CPC propaganda.<p>Shenzhen is really two cities. There is rich Shenzhen, which is mostly shopping malls and gated communities. Then there is poor Shenzhen, which is urban villages (think Kowloon Walled City) and factories. In rich Shenzhen people drive Porsches, take taxis or ride the subway. In poor Shenzhen people get on the backs of e-bikes or ride the bus. Poor Shenzhen borders Dongguan and Huizhou, which are cities that feel very similar except that their buses and motorcycles still belch out toxic fumes.<p>I had to laugh at the article&#x27;s assertion that Longgang district was &quot;modern&quot;. Large parts of Longgang are still rural and industrial. I have no doubt there are corners of Longgang that some ambitious local party official would love to show off as being the latest and greatest smart city, but that&#x27;s likely to only exist in very small areas around the cookie-cutter tower blocks built for the petite bourgeoisie who couldn&#x27;t afford identical (yet more expensive) apartments closer to the city.<p>Over the bay, Hong Kong remains an economic juggernaut. It punches way above its weight on the international scene, but in the context of the Pearl River Delta it comes across as parochial. While people in Zhuhai and Foshan and Guangzhou learned a second language so they could talk to their neighbors in Dongguan and Shenzhen and Huizhou, many Hongkongers did not.<p>There are lots of great aspects of Hong Kong, but i think everyone in the PRD would agree that they are in their own bubble. They have their own concerns and their own dreams. I don&#x27;t think a bridge to Zhuhai or a high speed rail to Guangzhou is going to make much of an impact either way on that.<p>Macau isn&#x27;t even part of the story. A handful of people there are spectacularly rich because casinos, but both land-wise and population-wise they are a rounding error.<p>The way i see it this whole &quot;Greater Bay Area&quot; rebrand of what was formerly known as the PRD is just yet another oligarchal circle jerk. Perhaps i am too cynical, but i feel like it&#x27;s just a new way for the usual suspects to funnel even more money into their personal coffers.<p>Before this &quot;GBA&quot; thing kicked off, the PRD cities already had plans to link their public transport systems. You can already take buses and share bikes all over. Why wouldn&#x27;t we link the transit systems? We&#x27;re all squashed up next to one another. Plenty of poor people in the suburbs commute &quot;across the border&quot; to their factory jobs.<p>The government can talk all they like about reducing taxes or opening up the region for international commerce or whatever. To me that just sounds like the rich getting richer and the poor getting evicted.<p>Wake me up when they lift the Great Firewall for the whole PRD and not just a leased section next to Macau. Wake me up when the government provides comprehensive healthcare. Wake me up when migrant workers can get hukou. That will be some real change.