China’s greater 'Bay Area' is growing fast
CGTN
1530395507000

c1745f021eb24436a921d2615139fd99.jpg

Nansha port, the fastest growing port in southern China (Photo: CGTN)

China is developing its own “Bay Area”, a plan that could reshape China’s future economy.

It’s an emerging area of more than 120 million people named the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Bay Area.

It’s also called the Pearl River Delta, or PRD for short, and is made up of China’s two Special Administrative Regions, Hong Kong and Macao, as well as nine mainland cities in Guangdong Province, including tech-hub Shenzhen, and trade center Guangzhou.

Building a cluster of first-class ports is an essential part of the plan, which starts with Nansha Port – located at the mouth of the Pearl River in Guangzhou.

For container ships, it is the gateway to southern China – making it a lynchpin in China’s Maritime Silk Road.

Workers completed the third phase of construction in 2017, increasing the number of container berths to 16, and the ability to serve the largest container ships on Earth. The fourth phase, which kicks off this year, will make Nansha a fully unmanned automatic port. 

Xu Shaoyue is a freighter captain who has been sailing between the world’s best-known Bay Areas – San Francisco and Guangdong – for over 30 years. 

Efficiency might be the biggest selling point of China’s bay area. “My ship is a 50,000-ton freighter,” Xu says, ”here it’ll only need a worker to unload all of my goods, just within one day. But in the US, it’ll take four to five days.”

Despite such efficiency, Xu admits Chinese ports still have their weaknesses. “The Chinese ports are even better and more modernized. But in professional services like piloting a ship into harbor and traffic control systems, the US ports do a better job. So, the Chinese ports still need to improve their services.”

That shouldn’t be hard for Nansha. Thanks to Hong Kong, an established hub for global finance, China’s Bay Area has the necessary manpower and the capital.

“Hong Kong has high-end financial services and we on the mainland have huge growth potential,” says Song Xiaoming, Vice General Manager of Guangzhou Port Company Ltd.

Song added that with closer collaboration with Hong Kong, the region could bargain for more leverage and have more say in the global value chain when negotiating international shipment terms.

And an upgraded version of a free trade harbor might be the next step. Right now, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are applying to the central government to upgrade the current free trade zone to a free trade harbor that will remove most of the restricted investment and trade policies.