
China Experiments with a New Kind of Megalopolis - hhs
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/china-tries-building-a-new-kind-of-megapolopolis-a-1285094.html
======
smaili
This paragraph pretty much sums up the potential of what China's _Greater Bay
Area_ has to offer:

> Shenzhen has become a center for research and development that ranks
> alongside Silicon Valley. The area around the industrial city of Dongguan
> produces one-third of the world's jeans, while Foshan accounts for more than
> half of all refrigerators and air-conditioning units manufactured worldwide.
> Hong Kong is Asia's leading financial center and Macao is the largest
> gambling city in the world, with six times the gaming volume of Las Vegas.

Ironically, using the Bay Area as an inspiration feels like Apples and Oranges
given it's more tech-centric whereas this "Magalopolis" almost feels like a
country within a country. Very curious to see how this grand plan progresses
over the coming years.

~~~
AFascistWorld
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiong'an](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiong'an)

Xi's brainchild.

"millennium strategy".

And new title for Shenzhen, "Frontier Demonstration Area of Socialism".

------
sremani
>> building a megacity in the Pearl River Delta that it hopes will one day
rival New York and Tokyo

Construction is 50% of their GDP (fact-check me here) and this feels like
business as usual to keep the gravy train rolling.

~~~
rolltiide
have you ever seen a construction project that didn't appear like a total
racket?

I wouldnt try holding construction groups and Chinese central planning to a
higher standard

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>have you ever seen a construction project that didn't appear like a total
racket?

Yes but none of them were funded or overseen at the state or national level.
The source of the funds, the people doing the constructing and the people with
the stake in the results was a fairly tight loop. The extra overhead of
state/national projects seems to provide enough inefficiency/friction that
just turns the whole thing into a money pit.

~~~
coliveira
Research the interstate highway system: completely funded by the US
government, paid by taxes.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Research the Big Dig.

Most of the interstate was built 50+yr ago when the administrative overhead of
such projects was far, far lower. The states basically said "here's where it's
going" and did it without much local input, environmental assessment, etc,
etc. Government also was far less risk averse in those days (so more stuff was
done in house at cost).

The interstate is actually a great example of how costs have increased over
time since it was mostly built over a 30yr period.

------
xvilka
There are also two more gigacities already - Yangtze River Delta[1] and
Jingjiji[2]. They all started integration already, for example Shanghai metro
is being connected to Suzhou metro.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_River_Delta](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_River_Delta)

[2]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingjinji](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingjinji)

~~~
sunstone
Interesting that all three gigacities seem to be in low lying coastal areas. I
would expect them to hedge their bets regarding global warming and sea level
rise.

------
alisonatwork
This article feels like it's rehashing a lot of stale CPC talking points.

I moved to the PRD a few years ago because i am a city nerd. I love urban
development and i heard that this was the boomtown of the world. It is a
pretty interesting place, but it's not as remarkable as it comes across if you
live overseas and/or only consume CPC propaganda.

Shenzhen is really two cities. There is rich Shenzhen, which is mostly
shopping malls and gated communities. Then there is poor Shenzhen, which is
urban villages (think Kowloon Walled City) and factories. In rich Shenzhen
people drive Porsches, take taxis or ride the subway. In poor Shenzhen people
get on the backs of e-bikes or ride the bus. Poor Shenzhen borders Dongguan
and Huizhou, which are cities that feel very similar except that their buses
and motorcycles still belch out toxic fumes.

I had to laugh at the article's assertion that Longgang district was "modern".
Large parts of Longgang are still rural and industrial. I have no doubt there
are corners of Longgang that some ambitious local party official would love to
show off as being the latest and greatest smart city, but that's likely to
only exist in very small areas around the cookie-cutter tower blocks built for
the petite bourgeoisie who couldn't afford identical (yet more expensive)
apartments closer to the city.

Over the bay, Hong Kong remains an economic juggernaut. It punches way above
its weight on the international scene, but in the context of the Pearl River
Delta it comes across as parochial. While people in Zhuhai and Foshan and
Guangzhou learned a second language so they could talk to their neighbors in
Dongguan and Shenzhen and Huizhou, many Hongkongers did not.

There are lots of great aspects of Hong Kong, but i think everyone in the PRD
would agree that they are in their own bubble. They have their own concerns
and their own dreams. I don't think a bridge to Zhuhai or a high speed rail to
Guangzhou is going to make much of an impact either way on that.

Macau isn't even part of the story. A handful of people there are
spectacularly rich because casinos, but both land-wise and population-wise
they are a rounding error.

The way i see it this whole "Greater Bay Area" rebrand of what was formerly
known as the PRD is just yet another oligarchal circle jerk. Perhaps i am too
cynical, but i feel like it's just a new way for the usual suspects to funnel
even more money into their personal coffers.

Before this "GBA" thing kicked off, the PRD cities already had plans to link
their public transport systems. You can already take buses and share bikes all
over. Why wouldn't we link the transit systems? We're all squashed up next to
one another. Plenty of poor people in the suburbs commute "across the border"
to their factory jobs.

The government can talk all they like about reducing taxes or opening up the
region for international commerce or whatever. To me that just sounds like the
rich getting richer and the poor getting evicted.

Wake me up when they lift the Great Firewall for the whole PRD and not just a
leased section next to Macau. Wake me up when the government provides
comprehensive healthcare. Wake me up when migrant workers can get hukou. That
will be some real change.

~~~
tony
I don't understand the end game of what their current system is trying to
achieve. I think they're trying to avoid splitting / division while hitting
economic quotas (which they can't do without international commerce!), to
spite everything else. It feels reduced to that.

What if China were to read through [https://europa.eu/european-
union/sites/europaeu/files/docs/b...](https://europa.eu/european-
union/sites/europaeu/files/docs/body/treaty_establishing_a_constitution_for_europe_en.pdf)
and:

\- remove GFW

\- fix environmental issues / smog

\- let regions with different realities self-govern, so it's still a country,
but joined by commonality and principles Sun Yat-Sen would agree with

\- cooperate on big picture things, e.g. currency, health
insurance/regulation, customs, legal basics

\- focus on human dignity, employment, labor rights, social security, beefy
pension plans

\- being able to regulate against price gouging, corruption, etc

\- bring back traditional Chinese characters

What's wrong with China working closer to the way HK or Taiwan operates but
having a constitution / system like EU?

~~~
ackbar03
Why would they want to go backwards. Anyone who has spent sometime in China
will understand that it's stripped Hong Kong and Taiwan far behind.

And this just leaves me scratching my head

\- bring back traditional Chinese characters

I'm not sure what the motivation behind this is or if it's just due to a lack
of historical awareness. Simplified Chinese characters were introduced as a
way to improve overall literacy in the country to decrease the barrier for
education. It was a smart move. If other regions want to preserve traditional
characters out of tradition that's totally cool but overhauling the simplified
character system would be again going backwards

~~~
tony
If it's handwriting, maybe Simplified writing can serve as a way to write
notes. But with computers and standardized education everywhere, why?

Please understand, the simplified Chinese conversion was done at a time where
literacy was low worldwide:
[https://ourworldindata.org/literacy](https://ourworldindata.org/literacy)

There is more context at:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simplified_Chinese_characters)

This was the dearest point I had. You can even call the other points facetious
or an overall thought experiment.

That's why I take great pride in my work on Cihai ([https://cihai.git-
pull.com/](https://cihai.git-pull.com/)), which makes characters preserved
through the Unicode Consortium's UNIHAN project more accessible. They will be
ready and waiting to be implemented once again.

See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification)

In fact, our computers everywhere around the world reserve the codepoints of
even ancient, now unused Chinese characters. UNIHAN also covers the ones used
in Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese also
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_la...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_language-
dependent_glyphs)), and variants across them. And there are also reservations
for bagua and yi jing hexagrams.

I hope China pulls the plug on this Simplified writing experiment. Chinese is
a very beautiful language!

------
AFascistWorld
China hasn't had a financial crisis for 40 years, I wonder how long they can
last, and how well their ubiquitous multi-million dollar condos would fare; or
can they prove again that nothing communists can't tackle, and capitalism with
Chinese characteristics are indeed immune to self-correction.

~~~
NTDF9
China has had plenty of those. But their levers are different. They actively
overspend on infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy whenever there
was a downturn.

In the past, that worked really well, spending to hand money to the poor who
improved their standards of living. Will this work in the future? Nobody
knows.

~~~
AFascistWorld
One can say that as now the second largest economy, China didn't cause
financial crisis in the 40 years of opening up, outside crises didn't trigger
significant slowdown, part of the immunity is that China just has so many easy
ways to simply write it off.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Why stop at 40 years? By that definition, China hasn’t had a financial crisis
for the last 70 years, at least.

------
sebastianconcpt
_Hong Kong 's unique role as a separate economic entity, governed by the rule
of law, is perhaps its best chance to avoid becoming another Chinese city
among many others._

------
kazinator
You can't really rival something like New York without the personal freedom
and the blending of cultural currents and all that. Copying the skyscrapers
and knife-in-a-back-alley grit is merely cargo culting.

~~~
istorical
Ehhh, that's one aspect of a megacity. There are many other aspects which may
be shared.

------
rb808
There was a Bloomberg show on Shenzen earlier in the year. It actually really
surprised me how modern it is, and its built in a few decades from nothing.
Worth watching the first few minutes at least.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLmaIbb13GM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLmaIbb13GM)

~~~
Steven_Vellon
Scholars speculate that Shenzhen may have been the fastest growing urban
center in human history. The growth is staggering, with the population rising
from 1.5 million in 1990 to just over 10 million in 2010. Imagine the entirety
of Washington State's population moving to one city in the span of 20 years.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen#/media/File:Shenzhen,...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen#/media/File:Shenzhen,_China,_city_population_dynamics.png)

------
blacksmith_tb
Funny to think that William Gibson prescient about The Sprawl[1] but wrong
about what continent it would develop on... though the Chinese version is much
more top-down, anything but accidental.

1:
[https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sprawl](https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sprawl)

~~~
segfaultbuserr
My understanding is that Gibson's _The Sprawl_ was the result of technical
megacorps and their unrestricted growth under hypercapitalism, a pretty common
cyberpunk theme. The Chinese version is created in forms of executive order,
nowhere close to Gibson's prospective, but regardless, the end-result is quite
identical and cyberpunkish, pretty interesting.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
Wasn't it somewhat about Japan, the China of 1980 so to speak?

------
voidreaper
Here’s a cool interactive map of the Pearl River Delta megalopolis:
[https://geoshen.com/posts/the-pearl-river-delta-
megalopolis](https://geoshen.com/posts/the-pearl-river-delta-megalopolis)

------
gcbw3
hong kong importance is not because it is a megalopoly. It is not.

Hong kong is a tax avoidance hub just like Jersey and City of london (see
[http://spiderswebfilm.com/](http://spiderswebfilm.com/) to understand why the
city of london doesn't mean the city of london)

tax avoidance and international trust funds are the reason hong kong is "huge"

------
dirtyid
Semi related: city Beautiful just released a quick video on Greater Tokyo
history. It's always fascinating to see how these megalopolis arise. Though
TFW the most expeditious route to modernization is either war, natural
disaster or state directed development.

------
rolltiide
Its nice to read publications from countries that have no relevant
geopolitical rivalry with the country being discussed

Would like to see more!

------
carapace
> Longgang is also subjected to continuous surveillance. In the spring of
> 2017, a couple reported that their three-year-old son Xuanxuan had been
> abducted. A security camera captured the scene, and it took the police
> precisely two seconds to identify the kidnapper using facial recognition
> software. They located the perpetrator and the child on a train shortly
> thereafter.

Wow. This is something to think about. Would you trade privacy for this level
of safety?

I think we are going to have the surveillance anyway, for economic if not
political reasons, but that once we get used to it we will find ourselves
better off (I hope!)

[http://firequery.blogspot.com/2013/10/total-surveillance-
is-...](http://firequery.blogspot.com/2013/10/total-surveillance-is-
perfection-of.html)

If the "Social Credit" system is administered without corruption, by being
self-referential, it seems that the end result could be that it works. A
kinder, gentler tyranny of Mrs. Grundy.

~~~
FussyZeus
> Wow. This is something to think about. Would you trade privacy for this
> level of safety?

The problem I have is never with the system itself, but who is it's master.
And this isn't even just a China thing, I'm against pretty much every
government on the planet having this kind of system at it's disposal.

