After the US in March passed the Taiwan Travel Act to authorize official bilateral contacts, China offered a series of benefits and subsidies to Taiwanese business executives, accountants, lawyers, scientists, professors, publishers, artists and filmmakers that used to be exclusively available to Chinese citizens.
This signified a more extensive “united front” tactic to lure Taiwan’s technology, talent and capital to China.
One underreported area of development is the Chinese policy to transform a cluster of cities in the Pearl River Delta into a high-tech financial zone called the Greater Guangzhou-Hong Kong-Macau Bay Area.
If implemented successfully, this ambitious project should appeal to Taiwanese economic, scientific and cultural elites.
The bay area initiative originates from a larger project of regionalization. In 2003, then-Guangdong Province party secretary Zhang Dejiang (張德江) proposed to build the Pan-Pearl River Delta, advancing business ties between nine Chinese provinces (Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, Hainan, Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan), and the special administrative zones of Hong Kong and Macau.
The Pan-Pearl River Delta, if founded, would have become the largest regional economic bloc in China, comprising one-third of the country’s population, one-fifth of its territory, 40 percent of its GDP and 60 percent of its foreign direct investment.
The project never took off, but it led to serious conversations about regional integration in Chinese official, business and media circles.
Effective strategic planning is always essential for continued economic growth in the bay area.
Given the uneven levels of development and the complex political and jurisdictional settings, transregional integration has been fraught with obstacles from the very beginning.
The first major challenge concerns the governance arrangement of the new financial zone. To date, Chinese state planners, Guangdong provincial officials, and Hong Kong and Macau’s chief executives have not engaged in a meaningful dialogue about the logistics of transregional governance.
Elsewhere in the world, there has been a paradigmatic shift from relying on national leadership as a sole planner of regional development to embracing different interest groups, professional bodies and civic sectors in the decisionmaking process.
For example, since the 1990s, urban planners and local governments across the EU have combined strategic planning with transformative actions to resolve the complexities of urban and regional development.
This new awareness coincided with a growing concern for the protection of common assets and pluralistic spaces. Such an open, transparent and participatory process involved diverse groups of people in urban planning within the EU.
However, the Chinese model of economic management favors efficiency over consensus. Unless Beijing is willing to consult and engage with ordinary citizens and community organizations in this transregional project, it is hard to know how the powerful force of integration will improve people’s lives.
The second obstacle concerns the need to mediate internal rivalries for external resources. Interregional competition for outside capital often undermines any progress toward transregional cooperation.
The rhetoric of regionalization should be taken with a grain of salt, because any regional project is still subject to Beijing’s nationwide agenda.
Since the 1980s, former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) reform policies have led to severe competition for capital and technology among rival provinces. In the past, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) top leaders blamed the economic dukedoms in Guangdong for opposing Beijing’s macroeconomic policies, and for keeping local tax revenues and foreign investments to themselves.
Worse, the bay area proposal has not generated any clear objectives at the regional level.
The longstanding economic, social and cultural links across the Pearl River Delta highlight the need to create an effective system of megacity governance.
The long-term strategy is to transfer authority in socioeconomic planning and political governance from the central and provincial leadership to a transregional governing body.
Beijing has not announced a new ruling framework, lest it lose control of this vast economic bloc in southern China. Such a limitation is bound to hinder the further integration of all major cities.
Of all the municipal leaders in the bay area, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) appears to be the most competent and cosmopolitan, and enjoys tremendous support from Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). A feasible option would be to expand Lam’s authority from Hong Kong to the bay area.
With her impressive record of leadership during the British colonial and postcolonial eras, Lam should be able to transform the bay area leaders’ forum from a chattering club into a formal governing body, and resolve any potential socioeconomic and political conflicts.
The third area of concern is the desperate need to build an integrated system of highway, sea and air transportation networks, because the existing infrastructure is outdated and fails to serve the fast-growing population.
Equally problematic is the bay area’s spatially differentiated pattern of modernization. The well-developed cores like Hong Kong, Macao, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are eager to pursue faster regionalization to remain competitive nationally and globally, but the peripheries have yet to benefit from deeper integration.
Although infrastructural upgrades and economic sustainability are at the top of official agendas, it is still necessary to establish a transregional body to overcome bureaucratic barriers and advance genuine crossregional cooperation.
In short, China’s export-driven, labor-intensive system of industrialization has run its course. The bay area has the potential to turn outdated business activities into high-tech, knowledge-based industries under a coherent plan.
This transformation hinges on the ability of Chinese national and local leaders to establish an effective, autonomous transregional body to maximize their freedom of action.
Only by creating this new administrative platform will Beijing have adequate power cleavages to bring all regional interests to the negotiating table and formulate developmental strategies.
Joseph Tse-Hei Lee is a professor of history at Pace University in New York City.
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