It is seven o'clock in the morning at the Lowu border post and the migrant workers are pouring through. Mostly labourers working in the North New Territories, they are Hong Kong residents who have moved to Shenzhen in search of lower living costs. Often they bring their children, who must cross the border every day to go to school in Hong Kong, with them. With one foot in mainland China, one foot in Hong Kong, are they the face of the future? Will the border with Shenzhen follow many other borders worldwide that have fallen - or at least become almost invisible - in this era of globalisation? On the first morning of the Special Administrative Region, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa promised that 'Hong Kong and the motherland will move forward together, hand in hand.' But the reality at the start of the new millennium is that today, the Hong Kong Government has still not indicated its choice: whether the SAR will continue as a self-contained region, or whether it will integrate with neighbouring areas. Professor Victor Sit Fung-shuen, who has been studying the Pearl River Delta at the University of Hong Kong for two decades, says this is a key question for Hong Kong's future. Professor Sit, a National People's Congress deputy and an adviser to the Shenzhen authorities, says that with the exception of Mr Tung most officials are still treating Hong Kong as an island. 'We need a change of mentality,' he says. The increased competition for Hong Kong's middleman role as a result of the mainland's entry to the World Trade Organisation means 'we need to deepen our economic relationship with the rest of the Pearl River Delta Area'. The Delta has land and labour, and many skills that Hong Kong lacks. With a land area of 40,000 square kilometres, in the next millennium it could do much to relieve pressure on the 1,097 square kilometres of Hong Kong. Yet, apart from co-operation on water and power, and Hong Kong companies using mainland China as a production base, links remain shallow. On a social front, the only move has been allowing 1,765 elderly now living over the border to receive Hong Kong CSSA. Ports, airports, roads, rail, treatment of pollution, universities - these and other civic issues are being largely planned in isolation. And there is a big question that has to be answered on a political level first: whether we really want to get closer to our northern neighbour. Dr Raymond Ho Chung-tai, the legislator representing the engineering professions, says that anyone wanting a physical commentary on the state of relations need only stand at the footbridge at the Lowu crossing and gaze into the river below - inky black despite years of supposed joint work to clean it up. Despite the return of sovereignty, he says, 'the Government still hasn't been doing enough to match up our infrastructure with the proposals over the border.' Officials still largely plan as if Hong Kong was not linked to the rest of China. Professor Sit points to the strip of SAR land that abuts Shenzhen, which is home to scrapyards and a new abattoir, and is destined to house a major new prison. Just metres away are some of the most prestigious offices in China. The problem, he says, is that most Hong Kong officials see the border as a security issue rather than an opportunity to create links with the neighbours. This is partly because they see increased border activity as leading to more Hong Kongers taking their money to spend over the border - a problem so far felt most acutely by the shops and restaurants in Sheung Shui - whereas Shenzhen regards that as a gain. The debate over a land departure tax, the as-yet undecided proposal to charge $20 for crossing into the mainland, is a sign of that official fear. Leakage of people, and therefore cash, could increase rapidly if middle-class workers become cross-border commuters, potentially slashing revenue from property sales by billions. However, says Andrew Lam Siu-lo, president of the Hong Kong Institute of Planners, such leakage is inevitable: the only question is the speed at which it happens. From a planning point of view, he says it makes a lot of sense to have closer integration with our northern neighbour. Recreational facilities and better housing could all improve the livelihood of Hong Kong people, he notes. 'If there was no politics, no history, there would be nothing to stop people moving across the border,' he says. Officials point out that the Basic Law states Hong Kong must be a separate customs territory - and this is also necessary if the SAR is to retain privileged access to the world's technology. But Professor Sit says many other aspects of the border can be made more flexible without infringing the Basic Law. Instead, he says, after being 'given the cold shoulder too many times', officials in Shenzhen City and Guangdong province are both losing interest in co-operation. Officially, despite the impact of Disneyland, the Hong Kong Government is expecting the growth rate of cross-border traffic to ease next year. Yet the figures indicate that is unlikely or at best a blip. In 1983, when the mainland's doors were still opening, just 8,000 vehicles a day crossed the border. In 1998 that figure was 27,000. For travellers on foot, the rate has been growing at 17 per cent a year. Even Secretary for Transport Nicholas Ng Wing-fui said in October that this trend is 'likely to persist'. Shenzhen municipal border office deputy director Zeng Lihuang expects much more than persistence in the figures. Earlier this year, Mr Zeng said pedestrian crossings into the SAR were likely to triple over the next 10 years, with or without the establishment of a single 24-hour border checkpoint, an issue hotly debated by authorities on both sides of the Shenzhen River. Yet if Hong Kong truly integrates with its neighbours, even those figures would just be a taste of the future. For instance, Mr Tung often speaks of Hong Kong as being the New York of China. If so, could the traffic levels between Hong Kong and Shenzhen ever approach those between New York and New Jersey? Such an increase would be staggering. The George Washington Bridge, just one of the bridges linking Manhattan to its neighbour, carries 140,000 vehicles a day - five times as much traffic as all Hong Kong/Shenzhen vehicle crossings. Professor Sit says the comparison has some validity. He says all great cities have a periphery which provides services. Some of the pressure has been eased by the fall in property prices in Hong Kong, which has deflected attention from the issue of cross-border commuting. Yet if property prices rise, mainland flats will again appear more attractive and the debate will reopen. Some business groups have suggested that the border could be redrawn to take in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, creating a 'Greater Hong Kong' of 20 million people. Others have espoused a wider Pearl River Delta region taking in Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen and Guangdong, of 40 million people: for instance, Bank of East Asia chief executive David Li Kwok-po in 1996 envisaged a 2006 'Pearl City' within which individual districts had their own governments but a Pearl River Delta Authority administered infrastructure and overall planning such that travel from Stanley to Guangzhou took 90 minutes. Not only that, but pooling talent and other transport resources such as container terminals and airports, it could be 'one of the largest, richest urban areas in the world'. But these ideas have been flatly rejected by government officials. Secretary for Planning, Environment and Lands Gordon Siu Kwong-chiu rejected the Greater Hong Kong suggestion at a conference earlier this year with the abrupt words 'I think the short answer is 'no'.' In fact, of the only joint projects so far - Hong Kong lending money to Guangdong province to upgrade the water channel that supplies it, the slow improvement of the Shenzhen River, and the movement of SAR-supported elderly - the last two were negotiated under British rule. Meanwhile, the Shenzhen side is pushing ahead with extra links. Central to those efforts is development of a new mass transit-linked border post at Lok Ma Chau and Huanggang, able to accommodate 250,000 visits per day. The border will be served by the KCR, which plans to have completed its Sheung Shui to Lok Ma Chau link by 2004, and the Shenzhen Metro Corp, which plans to open the Huanggang spur to its 14.85-kilometre new subway line in 2003. Construction of the Shenzhen Western Corridor, to provide rail and road links between Yuen Long and Shekou, is also expected to get under way shortly. Yet these links remain very local. Dr Ho notes that Hong Kong still has no link with the Beijing-Shenzhen railway. The meagre 10 cross-border trains available in Hong Kong every day go only to Guangdong destinations. And there has been no suggestion that Hong Kong should co-operate with its neighbours on major projects beneficial to the region. Developer and engineer Sir Gordon Wu Ying-sheung, for instance, has proposed building a rail line to Wuhan in the middle Yangtze region. This booming region is normally considered Shanghai's hinterland - but its distance from Shanghai and Guangdong is about the same. A rail link would pull it into the Pearl River economic system - but his suggestion has been met with silence, and no other major joint projects are even under study. One key issue is the different views of the border, on either side. As the University of Hong Kong's Professor Anthony Yeh Gar-on of the Centre of Urban Planning and Environmental Management noted in a 1995 paper Planning And Management Of The Hong Kong Border, the border is asymmetrical. Hong Kong authorities are keener on the entrance from the north of ideas and culture than of people. Yet culturally Hong Kong remains apart, especially for those organising the links who are government officials schooled in the middle-class British tradition, more familiar with Shakespeare and the kings and queens of a distant kingdom than with similar Chinese history and more likely to have friends in Vancouver and London than in Shenzhen. On the Shenzhen side, Hong Kong residents are very welcome as bringers of economic benefits. But culture and ideas are not welcome, either as physical products such as newspapers or VCDs, or in the shape of people such as Democrats or Falun Gong practitioners. This explains why Zhuhai has been so enthusiastic about its 40-km bridge right across the Pearl River to Hong Kong, which at one stage it appeared ready to start on its own - it wants to try and capture some of Hong Kong's economic growth. But from the Hong Kong side, such a bridge could mean a traffic crisis in the West New Territories and a fall in land values if the residents of that region decided that the palm-lined streets of Zhuhai were a nicer place to live. A bridge over Deep Bay would allow the Shenzhen authorities to direct border traffic around the outskirts of the city, because they know that 50 per cent of it wants to drive straight through the Special Economic Zone rather than into Shenzhen City centre, where they also want to avoid huge traffic jams. But Dr Ho says this typifies the different views on how connections should be physically arranged. Sitting in the middle is a committee called the Hong Kong/Mainland Cross-Boundary Major Infrastructure Co-ordinating Committee, described officially in Hong Kong as a 'useful forum for exchanging views and information'. Yet this falls far short of what other twin cities have established. As far back as 1921, for instance, New York and New Jersey created a joint-port authority, to end rivalry so intense it once led to a shootout between New York and New Jersey police officers. Now the authority runs not only the port but bridges between the states, tunnels, a business park and airports. George Yuen Kam-ho, chief executive of the Better Hong Kong Foundation, says the border should also not be viewed only as a handicap. It ensures that Shenzhen remains an area with relatively low labour costs that can also be home to talents from across the mainland, and the SAR remains open to the world with freedom of information. 'That disparity itself provides the strength of diversity,' he says. Economically, there is no doubt that Hong Kong and its neighbours have melded to form a single unit. Bookshop shelves for years have been groaning under the weight of volumes singing the praises of the region under its various names of 'Hong Kong Plus', 'the Pearl River Delta Supercity', 'The Hong Kong Megapolis' and more. As of March, Hong Kong had invested $1.1 trillion in the mainland, and Chinese enterprises had raised $63 billion on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The question to be answered for the future is whether the relationship should step beyond that. Additional reporting by Matthew Miller in Guangzhou
