Inside Out | Turn down a seat at the Greater Bay’s US$1.5 trillion feast? That timidity is very unlike Hong Kong’s entrepreneurial spirit
- We would not be asking for favours, but pointing to the changes that would add to the strength and dynamism of the hole region, just as they did for Hong Kong
- There is a fringe minority - let’s call them “Hexiters” - who seek to keep the Greater Bay Area at arm’s length
I remember large Hong Kong maps that used to hang on the walls of the offices of British colonial officials, that reached the Shenzhen River boundary and then went blank white.
It was as if there was nothing of value beyond the creaky Lo Wu bridge, or that Shenzhen was an empty space waiting for Hong Kong people and businesses to populate it.
Today, as Beijing has asked us to play a role in forging the Greater Bay Area, there are doubtless some who still nurture such naive and ignorant dreams. Alongside them sit a tiny eccentric minority - let’s call them “Hexiters” in homage to the Little Englanders that are catastrophically wrenching the UK out of the European Union - who seek to keep the Greater Bay Area firmly at arm’s length.
But for most of us, the practical - and very useful - reality is that an economy has grown around us that is today one of the largest and most dynamic regional economies in the world.
It amounts to around 70 million people and has an economic output estimated at US$1.5 trillion - the same size at South Korea and bigger then Australia.
We can claim some credit in this, with tens of thousands of Hong Kong investors over the past four decades building a large part of its early industrial infrastructure. But over the past decade or so, the region has assumed a life and personality of its own. In some ways it has outgrown us, with Shenzhen and Guangzhou today having significantly larger populations, and clear and distinct strengths of their own.