Pearl River Delta (South-East China) - Urbanisation and economic growth
Economic development and urbanisation
978-3-14-100890-6 | Page 127 | Ill. 3
Overview
In the Pearl River Delta, the Xi Jiang, China's third longest river, flows into the South China Sea. Comparing the maps shows how the region has changed in just 35 years as a result of economic and population growth. In 1980, Hong Kong and Guangzhou were cities with two million inhabitants, Foshan had 700,000 and Dongguan 400,000, and there were also several smaller cities. However, it was not the cities that dominated, but villages and land for rice and vegetable cultivation or aquaculture. At that time, about 70 percent of all Chinese still lived in the countryside.
Today, by contrast, almost 60 million people live in the Pearl River Delta on an area that, at 17,000 square kilometres, is barely larger than Thuringia. In Guangzhou, Dongguan Shenzhen and Hong Kong alone there are more than 30 million people, and, in addition, there are six cities with more than a million inhabitants (including Zhaoqing, west of Foshan). This leads to extremely high population densities. Even today, the cities have practically already grown together to form a coherent urban space. As a mega-metropolis, the Pearl River Delta is thus one third more populous than the Tokyo metropolitan area, the largest urban agglomeration on earth in terms of population.
Economic importance of the Pearl River Delta
Due to its immense economic output and a state-of-the-art transport infrastructure, the Pearl River Delta is of global importance. Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Guangzhou are home to three of the world's largest container ports, plus two major airports in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, which together handle more than 110 million passengers a year. Guangzhou's 300-kilometre-long metro network is connected to Foshan and Dongguan, and by 2020 a complete city train network will link all eleven major cities with express trains. In addition, the region is connected to the national high-speed rail network. The almost 2300-kilometre journey from Guangzhou to Beijing takes less than eight hours. One of the most significant infrastructure projects in recent years is the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, which since 2018 has been the world's longest bridge/tunnel connection (35 km) linking the Hong Kong and Macau Special Administrative Regions on both sides of the Pearl River Delta.
The region's economic importance is based on the whole cluster, but the eleven cities have also specialised. Especially Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, develops dominantly in the region. Around 30 percent of all Chinese exports come from this province, the "workbench of the world". Shenzhen - like Zhuhai - is the centre of industry and also home to large electronics companies such as Huawei and TCL. Hong Kong is Asia's financial metropolis and is almost exclusively characterised by the service sector. Electronic parts are manufactured in Huizhou, while Volkswagen produces 300,000 cars a year in Foshan. Other key industries in the region are information technology, mechanical engineering, textiles, chemicals, biotechnology, optics and photonics.
The immense growth is associated with huge infrastructural challenges in terms of housing needs, traffic control, energy production, water supply and waste disposal. A major unresolved problem is environmental pollution. The region suffers from severe air pollution, yet nearly a dozen more coal-fired power plants are planned. Almost more serious is the pollution of the river delta, into which tons of unfiltered sewage have been discharged for years. According to forecasts by environmentalists, the region will soon suffer from water shortages because the available water will be too polluted to use.
