China Experiments with a New Kind of Megalopolis | Hacker News Reader

China Experiments with a New Kind of Megalopolis

spiegel.de

112 pointshhs64 comments

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.

>almost feels like a country within a country

Exactly how I always saw the "new" China. Ever since my first intro to it in the early 90's. All of these are city-states trying to get as rich as they can, while acting as partners with each other for the favor of Beijing, and simultaneously competitors with each other for the favor of Beijing. If you go to all these places and they feel very different from each other. (At least, as an outsider they really felt different to me.)

There is nothing really strange about this new project, this is how most big cities in China were developed. The government planed future economic growth and then setup areas of development for each city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiong'an

Xi's brainchild.

"millennium strategy".

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

>> 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.

looks like its around 40% according to the world bank (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.TOTL.ZS?location...) which is probably based on data provided by the CCP. which kinda makes fact-checking data a fool-errand anyways.

Well there are satellite photos, construction workers can be questioned about their wage, material prices are semi-public (you don't know exactly what was negotiated in each contract but there is something of a market)... Too bad there is no public institution that estimates these things as far as I know. Although I bet most hedge funds along with the CIA have worked it out.

40-50% of today's GDP, spread over 10-20 years, doesn't sound so bad.

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

Just look at the BER Berlin capital airport. A funny story.

But you dont have to go that big (here in Germany). They just recently opened a road (700m long, across an empty field) - after 8 years of planning, 2 years of construction plus additional 1 year of delay - only at a cost of 12 million Euros.

Wow... I thought the US was bad!

>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.

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

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.

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

> Reply: Tries to hold constructions groups and Chinese central planning to a higher standard

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

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

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.

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.

> 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.

I agree with most of your observations, but this part I am afraid is not true. Most of Hongkongers (especially younger generation, no matter what kind of political views they have) has operational proficiency in Mandarin, given that 1. it is taught in school after 1997 and 2. most jobs involves talking to Mainlander/Taiwanese at some point.

This is really interesting to me! I work with a few Hongkongers here on the mainland, but i assumed they were a self-selected group of people who could speak Mandarin. When i go to Hong Kong i have a really hard time communicating with anybody because they do not like to speak either English or Mandarin. Admittedly, i tend to visit the smaller suburbs in North District so i may not be meeting the most cosmopolitan or mainland-friendly Hongkongers.

> Wake me up when the government provides comprehensive healthcare.

I was lucky enough to never needed to go to the doctor when I was in China. But from what I heard, it’s a nightmare to go to the hospital in China. Simply because of the sheer number of patients.

> Wake me up when migrant workers can get hukou.

I couldn’t agree more. This one especially I feel for.

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... 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?

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

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

There is more context at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simp...

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/), 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

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...), 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!

Going back to traditional characters was a strange addition to the list. But why would the other things there be going backwards? I don't see how those are mutually exclusive with economic success.

>bring back traditional Chinese characters

The Japanese people, through their democratically-elected representatives, chose to simplify many of their Kanji characters[0].

Should Japan also be forced to bring back traditional Japanese Kanji characters as well? What about Singapore[1]? I'm a little lost on which countries need to bring back their traditional characters and which needn't.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_Chinese_characters

I'm not familiar with Singapore or Japan.

I think it's a different topic at that point, not familiar with anyone advocating it in this thread or anywhere else.

They probably have different rationale behind simplification though. Even then, it was before the advent of computers / IMEs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_method)

China knows its shit. It becomes the current hub of world trade/manufactures, not for the points you listed, but:

1. GFW, to create their own national champions that is CCP's to control and boost their internal economy.

2. Loose environmental regulations and labor protections.

3. Marketing Economy with Chinese characteristics.

So pretty much the opposite of what you described. China adopts the raw parts of capitalism, and makes a cheap but efficient run of it. That is what gets to what it is today. \

Follow that school of thought, the Chinese leaders probably far from done with their capitalism experiments as of yet, for that capitalism is working so great for then. All the negative impacts haven't yet arrived there, so their intuition would be play it harder and harder, up their R&D spending, climbing up the global value chain, etc.

Until they reached the stage, when the capitalistic side effects start to show on themselves and destabilize their rule, they would not stop.

The Hong Kong today should ring the warning bell for the CCP.

They do work on environmental issues and smog like almost no one else. There is a strong realization that pollution should be curbed, and progress is visible on the span of a couple years. Also there is a progress in garbage sorting and recycling. Provinces have a high level of autonomy, country and municipalities work hard on making health insurance and services more accessible for everyone. Therefore, at least half of your points are already in works and progressing fast. People tend to think too much of stereotypes about China. Regarding traditional characters - this will never happen, there is so much content already using the simplified ones (even idea to do that sounds ridiculous).

You don't need a household registration in SZ, local resident card is all what's needed for most of things people need household registration outside of SZ

> Wake me up when the government provides comprehensive healthcare

There is one, and I'd say already better than one in Russia. 4 hours in line is certainly better than 1 week

> While people in Zhuhai and Foshan and Guangzhou learned a second language

Don't they all speak Cantonese/Mandarin Chinese?

It's complicated.

Despite what CPC propaganda would have you believe, Cantonese and Mandarin are essentially different languages[0][1]. Even inside the Cantonese topolect, there are certain mutually unintellible dialects. A notable example is Taishanese, which is not mutually intelligible with Guangzhou or Hong Kong Cantonese, yet they speak it in Jiangmen which is a city just next to Zhuhai.

On the east side of the river: Shenzhen, Dongguan and especially Huizhou has/had a lot of Hakka-speaking communities. Hakka is not mutually intelligible with either Cantonese or Mandarin. In the PRD there were also many other local village dialects that have largely died out today.

The point is that in mainland China, the CPC mandated that everyone learn Mandarin (a "high class" version of the Beijing topolect) so that everyone in the country would have a common language. In China, Mandarin is called Putonghua which literally means "common language". It is the language of education and the lingua franca, but at home people still tend to speak their own language.

The impression i get in Hong Kong is that many Hongkongers only speak Hong Kong Cantonese, or if they do speak a second language it is English. Even ignoring the traditional/simplified difference in written Chinese, this lack of a common language can create a barrier for communication with Chinese on the mainland.

[0] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=21415

[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42260

Fun facts I would like to add:

1. Even Cantonese in Guangzhou and Hong Kong is different. The way they formulate sentences makes it very easy to distinguish where one is from.

For example, Guangzhou people like to say, “Handsome brother, I got a question.” For Hong Kong people, it just sounds weird to call someone you don’t know handsome brother. Although, this would sound perfectly normal in China.

2. Hong Kong/ Taiwan uses traditional Chinese, while mainland China uses simplified Chinese.

Simplified Chinese was actually discouraged because it is considered shorthand; therefore, improper for formal writing.

Handsome brother (or pretty woman) is more of a countryside thing. It isn’t uncommon to hear it in the big cities, but it immediately flags the speaker as a bumpkin.

For us city folk, you hear it more often when touring (either from the local tour guides or between us ironically, but then I’m speaking as a foreigner).

Hahaha

I always get amazed by ability of locals guessing ones socioeconomic background just by looks.

Allegedly locals can guess which major town around one fares from just by facial features.

You can see it in SF, there is a certain Taishanese facial structure with many of the Chinese people there. They also call it Toisan themselves, which confuses the mandarin tech workers until you say Taishan.

In Hong Kong 20 years ago maybe, but today the number of mandarin speakers is much greater. At least in the core downtown retail industry, you won’t even be considered for a job if you can’t speak mandarin, while anyone under 30 has gone to school in all three languages for their entire lives.

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.

Is that really accurate? China was heavily hit by the Asian financial crisis, even if not as bad as the rest of Asia. The aftermath of Tiananmen wasn’t so great either. The early 00s was a crazy time as well, with bubbles forming and popping fairly rapidly. They had to recapitalize the banks afterwards, as well as nationalize most of their bad debt.

I guess it really depends on your definition of financial crisis.

Not true. In late 90s there is a severe internal financial crisis in China, many people get laid off from state-run enterprises.

It is just that China isn't a significant focus of the world or West at that moment so it barely gets noticed.

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.

It's a pretty hot take to suggest that counter-cyclical spending isn't a very strong response to recessions - this is classical economics in a nutshell. Just because the US is too politically paralyzed to spend at the same level doesn't mean that it's an ineffectual tool.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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,...

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

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.

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

China is closer to Gibson's Japan. The sprawl hasn't happened yet, but it could.

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

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/ 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"

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.

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

Would like to see more!

> 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-...

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.

> 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.

Well right now I'm more likely to break some asinine law than get kidnapped so I'll have to pass. Unless footage can't be used pre-emptively or something.

No thank you.

>If the "Social Credit" system is administered without corruption

Good joke.

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