Outside In | Hong Kong’s monument to procrastination -- the bridge to Macau
“The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge – White elephant or cash cow” said the breathless flyer for the SCMP conference last week. Of course it is neither. Instead, it is a stunning monument to our government’s capacity for procrastination.
Gordon Wu of Hopewell Holdings first proposed the bridge to the western side of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in 1988. The estimated price tag was US$6 billion. Today, the price tag is $120 billion and counting – just for the Hong Kong segments of the bridge. And oh, by the way, we will be lucky to have it open by 2020.
Way back in 1988, I thought the bridge was a brilliant idea. And on balance I still do – even though I always argued that it should include a rail line as well as a road. It would bring to an end to Hong Kong’s problem of sitting at the end of a “cul-de-sac”.
The bridge to Zhuhai is neither white elephant nor cash cow. Rather, it is an indispensable piece of infrastructure that greatly improves our integration with the economy that we should call our home economy. The sooner it is in place the better
Instead, Hong Kong would sit neatly at the southern end of a loop that integrated the entire Pearl River Delta. It would affirm Hong Kong’s dominant position at the heart of one of the world’s most dynamic manufacturing regions. It would also lift the neglected western municipalities of Zhongshan and Jiangmen.
Now, three decades later, the bridge remains an important part of the delta region’s future infrastructure, but it is less radically transformative for the PRD. Other bridges have been built further up the Pearl River.
Back then, Hong Kong accounted for 18 per cent of China’s GDP, and would have built on that predominance. Today, Hong Kong is barely 2 per cent of China’s GDP. Shenzhen is more populous and will soon overtake Hong Kong in terms of GDP.
When I first tramped through the rice paddies and sugar cane fields of Shenzhen and Dongguan in 1978, those two economies were half the size of the PRD’s two main western municipalities.
But as Deng Xiaoping swung open the doors to investment from Hong Kong in the early 1980s, billions of dollars swept into Shenzhen and Dongguan, these two municipalities were Hong Kong’s natural manufacturing hinterland along the creaking railway line across the Lowu Bridge from Hong Kong to Guangzhou.