THAT SETTLES IT THEN. The PPRD (Pan Pearl River Delta) is a roaring success. The achievements of talk shops are measured in how much talk is talked and the PPRD has certainly been getting the talk again this week.

The people who live in the hinterland of the PPRD may complain that they have seen little concrete benefit, but since when has concrete benefit been the object of a talk shop?

If they do not like it, they can always set up a PYRD (Pan Yangtze River Delta) and indulge in their own talk shop. They are in the delta of neither, but, at least, in Sichuan province they could make a start by getting the right river.

There is no doubt, however, that they are lagging. The red line in the first chart shows the aggregate economic growth of the eight non-delta members of the PPRD (Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan, Sichuan and Hainan). The blue represents the economic growth of the rest of the mainland.

Yes, I know these numbers must be nonsense. How can we get 12.2 per cent growth for one set of provinces and 13.7 per cent for all the rest when the mainland's overall economic growth rate last year was only 9.5 per cent?

Good question. Did you know that last year not a single province reported a growth rate lower than the national total? In fact, they all reported double-digit growth. The national total was the only figure to show single-digit growth.

The combined gross domestic product of the provinces was also 20 per cent greater than the national total. Yes, Mabel, the sum of the parts can indeed be greater than the whole. Just look up National Bureau of Statistics.

We can probably still take it as fact, however, that the PPRD's hinterland is a laggard and the second chart, which shows this hinterland's exports as a percentage of the national total, tells the same story.

But what else would you expect? The PPRD is a Guangdong creation and therefore serves Guangdong first. Thus, when Guizhou province complains that it has starved its own industries of power to serve Guangdong's, all you can really say is that this has always been the role of hinterland provinces. They serve rather than are served.

If Guizhou then wants to make things worse for itself by subscribing to the illusion of the PPRD talk shop, well, that is its own fault.

Of course, we in Hong Kong must take a different tack to all of this. It behoves us as a recent returnee to the fold of the motherland to subscribe to all approved causes in the mainland and the PPRD has the blessings of Beijing.

Thus, when our chief executive, Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, travels to Sichuan for the latest puffing of the PPRD bellows, he makes all the appropriate noises about building closer ties with the PPRD as Hong Kong's next stage in development - 'We have just started to realise its great potential.'

He has his own agenda, nonetheless. Hong Kong is now about to pander to Guangdong in the way that Guizhou does. He therefore urges his audience not to duplicate infrastructure projects that result in 'unnecessary competition and wasting of resources'.

Meanwhile, his administration has just decided to go ahead with a 19,400 square metre atrium expansion of the Convention and Exhibition Centre while in Guangzhou, Dongguan, Shenzhen and Zhuhai by the end of this year, there will be a total of 870,000 square metres of floor area in exhibition centres, most of it empty and destined to remain so.

But does the preacher then practise what he preaches? Was there any reference in our Donald's speech to Hong Kong reconsidering this atrium expansion on the grounds of it clearly being 'unnecessary competition and wasting of resources'?

No, I saw nothing of the sort. It is the other members of the PPRD he was lecturing on duplication.

And that is the way things go in a talk shop. At the podium you express warm feelings of joint effort while behind your back you hold a knife.