China’s Greater Bay Area push could worsen Guangdong inequality and usher in new ageing crisis
- Massive infrastructure investment in 12 regional cities has yet to boost growth, where per capita GDP is just a third of the average in richer regions
- The focus on Greater Bay Area development has sparked fears that resources will not be evenly spread through Guangdong
After a bumper year of sales in 2018, young entrepreneur Daniel Zeng wanted to give something back to his hometown of Yingde, a backwater city in the north of China’s Guangdong province.
Eager to help students from lower income and rural families improve their education, the founder of a Shenzhen-based tech start-up that sells online learning programmes offered his products to Yingde primary schools at 30,000 yuan (US$4,460) a set, a fraction of the 500,000 yuan (US$74,000) it would cost in Shenzhen.
The schools were interested, but even with the discount, they could not afford to pay the price.
Yingde’s weak consumption power, an indication of its economic strength, partly explains why young people like Zeng leave their hometowns in search of a middle-class lifestyle in Guangdong’s bigger and more prosperous cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
The city’s gross domestic product climbed 5.1 per cent to 20.8 billion yuan (US$3 billion) in the first nine months of 2018, according to the most recently available data from Yingde’s statistics bureau.
By comparison, the gross domestic product (GDP) for provincial capital Guangzhou in the same period rose 6.3 per cent on the year to 1.67 trillion yuan (about US$248 billion), almost 100 times larger.