The Washington Post-China is absorbing Hong Kong as geography follows politics

2023-11-15T15:09:00.211Z

HONG KONG — The Sham Chun River and adjoining wetlands, which separate Hong Kong from the Chinese city of Shenzhen, have throughout modern history served as a physical marker of the differences between the two territories and their distinct systems.

Millions swam across the river from Communist-ruled China to British Hong Kong in the 1960s, escaping famine and persecution in the hope of a better life.

As China’s economy liberalized decades later, skyscrapers and five-star hotels rose up in Shenzhen, looming over Hong Kong’s rugged and still-agrarian New Territories outside its central business district.

Even after the 1997 handover, when Britain ceded control to China, barbed wires and fences stood as a reminder that these were very different places, each with its own politics, courts of law, immigration policy, police force and way of life.

The river still flows, broad and slow, but the boundary it represented is dissolving. Two mammoth multibillion-dollar development projects backed by the Hong Kong and Chinese governments — including one that will straddle the banks of the river — will change the look, feel and economic pulse of Hong Kong, with one goal in mind: integration with mainland China.

Over the next decade, new rail links, bridges, logistics facilities, schools, office buildings and residential towers will transform Hong Kong’s outer fringes and remake the quiet towns and wetlands of the New Territories into an extension of Shenzhen, a Chinese technology hub. The property arm of a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, China Resources Group, has established a joint venture with a Hong Kong company to build residential units in what is being called the Northern Metropolis — signaling Beijing’s support.

The overall project will cover nearly 75,000 acres, almost 90 times the size of New York’s Central Park. Some $13 billion has already been put aside from government reserves for development, though the total cost will be many multiples more.

At the same time, the Hong Kong government is pursuing a grand land reclamation scheme known as the Kau Yi Chau Artificial Islands, a $75 billion project in the ocean waters off the city that will see the creation of three new islands. The project will result in nearly 2,500 acres of new territory for a business district, with apartment complexes that can accommodate 550,000 people. The islands will be connected to the mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai to the west of Hong Kong and by new transport links to Shenzhen in the north.

The projects will bring Hong Kong fully into the “Greater Bay Area” — Chinese President Xi Jinping’s vision of linking nine Chinese coastal cities with Hong Kong and Macao, the former Portuguese colony, as a rival to Silicon Valley. The plans, introduced back in 2017, marked a “change in paradigm” for Hong Kong, said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, but they have been pushed harder and faster more recently in line with the broader crackdown.

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Hong Kong was promised control over its own domestic affairs until 2047. But Beijing has over the past three years moved swiftly to remake the territory’s once-autonomous institutions and subsume Hong Kong’s identity, using a draconian security law to neutralize the city’s boisterous politics and crush mass protests over the loss of democratic rights. Schools are incorporating patriotic education, as on the mainland; the syllabus will include study of Hong Kong’s role in the Greater Bay Area. The legislature has been drained of opposition figures and the streets, once full of protesters, have been pacified.

Now, development is becoming a corollary to political control.

“The reality is that the gap [between Hong Kong and China] is getting smaller and smaller,” Tsang said.

Developing Hong Kong’s New Territories

The Northern Metropolis development project is unprecedented in Hong Kong’s history, in both scale — it is 35 times bigger than the last development project in that area — and financing.

According to government proposals, the 75,000 acres earmarked for development will be divided into four zones catering to specific industries, such as information technology and logistics.

Full plans for each zone will be finalized this year, according to a blueprint, but work has already started on one major project — a tech park at the Lok Ma Chau Loop, a small piece of land by the Sham Chun River that used to belong to Shenzhen but could only be accessed from Hong Kong, and became part of its territory in 2017.

The government also plans to build half a million new residential units in the Northern Metropolis to accommodate 2.5 million people — about a third of Hong Kong’s current population.

Taken together, the plans could shift the territory’s economic center of gravity to the north.

The Hong Kong Development Bureau said housing scarcity and the potential for spurring economic growth — more than politics — underscore the need for both the Northern Metropolis development and the island reclamation projects.

“The Northern Metropolis is an ideal platform for Hong Kong to forge closer economic cooperation with Shenzhen and the rest of the Greater Bay Area, capitalizing on the rapid economic development of the region,” the bureau said in a statement to The Washington Post.

Residents in the lush, rural enclaves scattered across Hong Kong’s northern fringe have started bracing for change. For decades, even as Hong Kong and southern China saw rapid development, these parts remained relatively untouched. The landscape — wetlands, fish and shrimp ponds fashioned out of mangrove swamp — has largely been preserved, offering a rare look at what life in this region was like before modernization in the 1980s. Village homes have been handed down through generations.

“Our families were pioneers who cultivated these lands,” said Kwok Chi-wai, 69, a lifelong resident of the Ha Wan village in Lok Ma Chau, adjacent to where the tech park will be built. Kwok remembers raising ducks, grass carp and mullet fish with his siblings as a child, and still cares for the trees he planted here with his father.

Authorities told Kwok that villagers, most of whom don’t own their land, could be relocated as early as next year, but he has received no specifics.

“We want our places here to not be taken away, so we can continue to stay and live here,” Kwok said. “But there’s nothing we can do.”

Physical integration

The effort to physically integrate Hong Kong with mainland China predates the two planned megaprojects, and even Beijing’s effort to suppress Hong Kong in the wake of the 2019 mass protests.

In late 2018, a 34-mile bridge-and-tunnel system — the world’s longest sea crossing — opened to the public, connecting Hong Kong with Macao and to Zhuhai in southern China.

The cost of building it swelled to some $20 billion — for a project that was seen by some as unneeded and as little more than a physical manifestation of the mainland’s encroachment on the city.

Cars drive on different sides of the road in mainland China and Hong Kong, and license rules differ between them. But authorities want to overcome these hurdles and increase traffic on the bridge. Mainland Chinese authorities allowed private vehicles from Hong Kong to start using the bridge last year, a move heralded as promoting further integration. The bridge is now open to tour groups from mainland China, and it hosted a half-marathon from Hong Kong in November.

The bridge followed the opening of the West Kowloon Station, connecting Hong Kong to China’s high-speed rail system. Its establishment introduced an unprecedented “co-location” agreement: Though physically in Hong Kong, half of the station was designated as mainland Chinese territory, with Chinese police and immigration officials allowed to operate there — a first for Hong Kong.

The ending of covid restrictions has seen increased utilization of the railway. The number of Chinese cities connected to Hong Kong by high-speed rail has grown to 73, and the number of passengers last year surpassed pre-pandemic levels, according to data from Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation. By the end of 2023, more than 20 million passengers had ridden on the cross-border rail, many of them mainland tourists visiting Hong Kong.

The “co-location” agreement at the high-speed rail station could also be extended to the new Northern Metropolis projects, analysts say, increasing the official presence of Chinese security agents and police on Hong Kong’s territory.

Rising from the sea

The artificial islands reclamation project was first floated in 2014. Under the current chief executive, the project was renamed the Kau Yi Chau Artificial Islands, and will involve the creation of three new islands with residential units, a new business district, sports facilities, open public space, arts facilities and more.

It took Hong Kong 170 years — its entire history as a colony — to secure through land reclamation from the sea about 17,300 acres of additional land across the territory to expand its ports and urban and residential areas, and for its international airport at Chek Lap Kok. Reclaiming the land needed for this new project in just 10 years will be a substantial undertaking, analysts say.

Though they are closer to Hong Kong’s existing islands than mainland China, the Development Bureau plans to connect the artificial islands to the Northern Metropolis, and characterizes the project as a way “to foster the integrated development between Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area.”

The Hong Kong government says it will complete a feasibility study on roads and rail links that will connect to the new islands by 2024, that it will start reclamation work in 2025 and that it expects the first batch of residential units to be available by 2033.

Environmentalists have raised alarm at the plans, which they argue will damage the ecology of the area, including corals, marine life, microorganisms and species such as the rare Chinese white dolphin.

“When natural resources are lost, they are lost forever,” said Chan Hall-sion, a senior campaigner for Greenpeace in Hong Kong. “Reclamation is irreversible, and brings irreversible impacts to an ecosystem, as it is the home to many wildlife.”

In its responses to The Post, the Development Bureau said the area designated for the planned artificial islands close to the existing Kau Yi Chau islands is “ecologically less sensitive” and that the government is striving to minimize the impact on the environment. Environmental impact assessments will be done for both projects, the bureau added, and will be released for public scrutiny.

Yet the deteriorating political environment in Hong Kong has meant that even criticizing the government’s plans carries risk. The Liber Research Community, a nongovernmental organization focused on Hong Kong’s land and development policy, has been at the forefront of independent research on both projects, pointing out deficiencies and information gaps in the government’s plans. Last year, the group published slides from an April 2023 briefing from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the financial adviser to the Hong Kong government on both projects, stating that the Hong Kong government’s reserves “may not be sufficient” to fund both development of the Northern Metropolis and the Kau Yi Chau islands at the same time.

Ta Kung Pao, a newspaper controlled by China’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, accused the Liber group of vilifying the government and “trying to create panic.”

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Polling in Hong Kong has found deep skepticism among the population about pursuing the projects, with only 6 percent of residents saying they are behind simultaneous construction of both projects, according to a survey conducted by Greenpeace and the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute.

Public opinion is, however, an aside. “These are obviously integration projects,” said Brian Wong of the Liber Research Community, “so they are inevitable.”

About this story

Story by Shibani Mahtani and Theodora Yu. Photos by Ian Teh. Design and development by Irfan Uraizee. Graphics by Lauren Tierney. Story editing by Peter Finn. Project editing by Reem Akkad. Research by Cate Brown. Photo editing by Jennifer Samuel. Design editing by Joseph Moore. Graphics editing by Samuel Granados. Copy editing by Vanessa Larson.

Renderings provided by the Hong Kong Development Bureau.

Panoramic photo annotations sourced from Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government and Kau Yi Chau Artificial Islands project.