China yesterday opened a new bridge over the Yangtze that will pave the way for rapid development of Chongming, the country’s “last virgin island,” and now just an hour’s drive from booming Shanghai.
With a surface area 50 percent bigger than Singapore, the island has captured the imagination of developers, who have considered building everything from a Disney theme park to a replica of Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch.
Some fear a parade of eager investors buoyed by the new transport links could ruin the rustic island and its vast wetlands, but officials insist the site will not become a stomping ground for land grabs and overdevelopment.
PHOTO: REUTERS/CHINA DAILY
“We believe the negative impact from the bridge will be almost negligible,” Zhao Qi (趙奇), the Shanghai government official in charge of Chongming, told reporters during a visit ahead of yesterday’s opening to normal traffic.
Two more bridges are planned that will connect Chongming to eastern Jiangsu Province as part of a national highway to central Xi’an, and to Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport, city construction commissioner Huang Rong (黃融) said.
Chongming earned global attention in 2005 when then-British prime minister Tony Blair and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) said it would be the site of the world’s first so-called “eco-city” Dongtan, designed by a British firm.
The low-carbon, ultra-efficient city of the future was meant to be showcased at next year’s World Expo in Shanghai, with 25,000 residents living there, but those plans have been overtaken by more traditional development objectives.
Zhao said the Dongtan plan was “still in the planning stages.”
Officials promote Chongming as the “last virgin island” and the “Shangri-La of Shanghai,” but it is hardly unspoiled wilderness. More than 700,000 people live there, and the population is projected to rise to 2 million within the next decade.
Residents currently depend on 18 ferry routes to reach the mainland, so the new bridge clearly will allow for faster commuting — and will spell big bucks for investors.
But many are concerned that the island could fall prey to unscrupulous developers.
Philip Enquist, a Chicago-based architect with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, was hired by the Shanghai government to design a master plan for the island, which included compact communities spaced about 16km apart.
But he had heard nothing from officials for two years when the Shanghai planning board handed authority over Chongming to a new department. Now he fears the bridge will bring unchecked construction.
“Chongming runs a huge risk of being poorly developed because it’s now accessible to Shanghai. There are very little constraints and there’s a lot of open land there,” Enquist said.
Chongming’s wetlands, which are home to several species of rare migratory bird, its proximity to Shanghai and its position at the mouth of the Yangtze combine to make the island a rare gem that should not be sullied, he said.
“It could play a very unique role and it shouldn’t be built into the same suburban-ness that so much of Shanghai is turning into,” said Enquist, who also designed the master plan for the development of Abu Dhabi.
Zhao insisted the government had embraced a broader definition of the island’s “ecology” to ensure that development did not come at the price of the environment.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS