In China’s national development blueprint a closer cooperation between Hong Kong, Macau and 9 cities in Guangdong Province is the aim to create a globally competitive and world-class city cluster by 2022.
A city cluster leading to a more interconnected Pearl River Delta area with Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macau as the 4 ‘core cities’ to drive the development along with Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Huizhou, Jiangmen and Zhaoqing making up the 70 million-population of this city cluster.
Hong Kong will play a key role in the development as a venture capital investment and financing hub, create the funding ecosystem and foster innovation and entrepreneurship with priority on data-driven capabilities like artificial intelligence and robotics.
Macau will be an international tourism city and platform for trade with the Portuguese speaking countries of the world.
Guangzhou will take the leading role as an administrative hub and Shenzhen the special economic zone and tech hub.
Dongguan will transform itself from the world’s factory into more of a hi-tech manufacturing base.
The infrastructure investments are well under way with the opening of the Hong Kong – Zhuhai – Macau megabridge and the high speed rail link from Hong Kong to the mainland in the autumn of 2018.
There is an emphasis on green development, reducing pollution and implementing more sustainable industry practices moving away from carbon-intensive coal-based power into cleaner and more renewable power generation.
Hong Kong and Macau are former European colonies with their own legal, monetary and political systems under the one country, two systems setup until 2047 and 2049 respectively.
