Concrete Analysis | Beijing’s dream of a ‘super city’ cluster still faces many challenges

The tremendous growth of the Chinese economy in the past 30 years was largely driven by the rise of the two super-city clusters – the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and the Pearl River Delta (PRD).

These country-sized regions, consisting of one or two mega metropolises surrounded by an assortment of satellite cities, together produce over 25 per cent of the country’s GDP. Not only that, for the past few decades they were the world’s greatest social and economic testing ground for wealth creation through urbanisation.

Here, the boundaries and classification of city tiers are blurred and comparative advantages exploited – wealth is more evenly shared. The secret of success of city clustering is that it bundles cities around a strong urban centre and utilises the comparative advantage of each city to forge a strong financial and manufacturing hub.

Meanwhile, the nation’s capital Beijing is the only first-tier city in northern China. Being one of the economic powerhouses of the country it has been trying to emulate the success of PRD and YRD over the past few years. A few years ago Beijing introduced the “Jing-Jin-Ji” super-city cluster, which integrates Beijing (Jing), with nearby Tianjin (Jin) City and Hebei Province (Ji). It is now being given support by the central government and expanding in full swing, vying to be the third major super-city cluster in the country in addition to the YRD and PRD.

As part of this blueprint, Beijing’s municipal government is already planning to move its offices by 2017 to the Tongzhou district, a suburban area 20km east of the city centre bordering Tianjin and Hebei, making Tongzhou the city’s “sub-administrative centre”. This moves the administrative core of Beijing a little closer to the heart of the Jing-Jin-Ji.

There is already a high-speed rail line linking landlocked Beijing and the port city of Tianjin, reducing the hour-long journey to just 20 minutes. There are also extensive motorway networks crisscrossing the region. Meanwhile, Beijing is planning to build a second major airport in the southern suburb of Daxing county by 2019. Once completed, the airport, serving the surrounding regions, will reach a capacity of 72 million passengers per year by 2025.