Shenzhen began life as a back yard for Hong Kong? factories, but today it has become a back yard for everyone to enjoy. With an official 35.2 square metres of planted ground per resident (43 percent of the total land), it has secured bragging rights as the mainland?s No1 garden city.
This might be hard to imagine driving through the downtown area of Luohu (Lowu in Cantonese), but once you get out on either the Binhe or Shennan thoroughfares leading up the coast to Shekou, it is clear how the city has done it. Mile after mile of well-maintained flower beds and grassy lawns make for a very relaxing journey. Add these man-made oxygen tanks to 200 km of coastline and a hilly backdrop, and you get more than enough green and blue to offset the gray of the city centre.
Chi Xiong Biao, director of the Shenzhen Tourism Bureau, is obviously proud of the city?s ecological selling points. He is also equally excited about the future. ?We will build Shenzhen into a beautiful seashore city,? he said in an interview.
There may still be a way to go, but this is clearly not idle talk. The Overseas Chinese Town group, which runs the theme parks in the Nanshan district, plans to spend 4 billion yuan on a new Ecological Park that will open by the end of next year. Billions more have been earmarked for upgrading tourism infrastructure to ensure that the environment is better protected in coming years.
Perhaps the one project that will have the biggest effect on the city?s environment will be the Mass Transit Railway system, which is due to open at the year?s end. Mr Chi waves away concerns about the tight deadline, insisting that the first line, running from the Luohu main station all the way out to the Nanshan district, will be ready. When it is, Luohu will be transformed, as traffic will move underground and the eyesore of a construction site will be grassed over. The second line will extend right to the airport.
The tourism chief concedes that Shen-zhen?s development in the past two decades has created a transport system that is ?fuza?, or bafflingly complex. But it has been steadily improving, and will get a boost by government efforts to put civil servants on a schedule that brings them to work at different times than the rest of the population.