A bridge alone can’t unify Hong Kong with China: David Fickling

(Oct 24): What’s the most important bit of infrastructure to connect an international metropolis like China’s Pearl River Delta? A demolished border post.

For all the excitement around the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge Wednesday, that’s probably the best lesson to draw from Beijing’s plan to draw Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Dongguan, Foshan and other cities into a single megalopolis. As my colleague Nisha Gopalan wrote last month, “Build it and they will come” is a lot easier said than done.

Take one model for the new link, the Oresund bridge and tunnel that’s joined Denmark’s capital Copenhagen to Malmo in southern Sweden since 2000. Like its Chinese equivalent, the 40-kilometer (25-mile) link opened with high hopes for turning two cities into one combined region. But even after Copenhagen’s housing boom drove some Danes to cheaper property in Sweden, these days there are just 19,000 cross-border commuters — about 1% of the region’s 1.8 million-strong labour force. Integration has been losing steam in recent years, according to a 2013 OECD paper.

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