This 24-kilometer, $6.7 billion bridge is a symbol of China’s ambitions and troubles

Hong Kong () — Even in a country known for its gigantic, record-breaking infrastructure, this project is turning heads. At 24 kilometers long, eight lanes wide, with artificial islands and an underwater tunnel, China’s $6.7 billion Shenzhen-Zhongshan Bridge is ambitious.

To much fanfare in the country’s state media, the bridge builders recently set a new world record by paving more than 22,600 square meters of asphalt in a single day, the equivalent of more than 50 basketball courts.

Although it sounds strange, it is not the longest sea bridge in the world. That honor goes to its 54-kilometre-long neighbor, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, just 32 kilometers away.

To some observers, the construction of these gigantic bridges so close together is a testament to both China’s growing ambitions on the world stage and the problems it faces in making them a reality.

Like its brother in Hong Kong, when the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Bridge opens to traffic next year after eight years of construction, it will be one of the pillars of China’s master plan to convert Greater Bay, one of the most largest and most populated in the world, in an economic and technological center capable of rivaling San Francisco, New York or Tokyo.

It is an ambition that, like the bridges themselves, is simply enormous. The Greater Bay Area is home to 68 million people, occupies 35,000 square kilometers and encompasses 11 cities: Hong Kong, Macao and nine others, including Zhongshan and Shenzhen. Shenzhen alone is home to more than 12 million people, not to mention dozens of multibillion-dollar companies like drone maker DJI and social media company Tencent, which have helped earn it the nickname “Chinese Silicon Valley.”

Beijing hopes the bridges will help physically and conceptually unite the cities in this huge and diverse area. Travel times between Zhongshan and Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport—mainland China’s third-busiest, handling more than 37 million passengers in 2019—are expected to drop from two hours (using current highways). 20 minutes.

But many observers believe the bridges are also intended to serve another, more political purpose, subsuming what are now quite disparate regions—Hong Kong is a former British colony, Macau a former Portuguese colony—into a single Chinese identity. And, according to some critics, the scale of this enterprise dwarfs even that of the bridges.

A declaration

Austin Strange, a Chinese foreign policy specialist at the University of Hong Kong, says the new bridge will undoubtedly bring “real economic value” by drastically reducing travel times between cities and traffic.

But he added there was a secondary dimension as well, comparing it to China’s efforts with its Belt and Road Initiative, in which Beijing spends billions financing infrastructure projects like ports and highways in countries around the world.

This project is seen as an effort by China to increase its economic and political influence on the world stage, and some critics accuse it of putting pressure on smaller countries by granting them loans they cannot repay.

Although the bridges, which are being built on Chinese soil, do not raise debt problems, observers say the scale of the project sends a message.

“The Chinese government clearly heralds the bridge as a world-class achievement,” says Strange. “Infrastructure is an essential part of China’s reputation in global development, and it is also a key link between how China approaches domestic and international development.”

The Shenzhen-Zhongshan Bridge project includes artificial islands and an underwater tunnel.

However, the deep impression that the bridge makes on the rest of the world will depend in part not only on its size, but on its success and popularity among travelers.

Otherwise, you risk exposing yourself to a criticism often leveled at some of the Belt and Road’s grandest projects: you are dealing with an expensive white elephant.

Finance professor He Zhiguo of the University of Chicago said that, like the bridges linking the shores of San Francisco Bay, the Chinese megaproject is likely to drastically reduce travel times.

However, only the citizens of Zhongshan would gain, as the sleepy town, which is neither a business center nor a tourist area, offers little incentive for others to visit.

He also said that estimates of the effect on travel times and costs had to be taken with a grain of salt, as the projects could easily be inflated. “That’s my concern. But without knowing more, I think it’s not a bad idea,” she said.

bridges over troubled waters

As ambitious as Beijing’s vision for the Greater Bay Area is, many bumps in the road have already arisen.

The idea was first floated in 2009, but experts say development has been hampered by the disparate nature and barriers between some of the cities involved.

The region has three borders: mainland China and the former colonies of Hong Kong and Macao, which are now semi-autonomous Special Administrative Regions of China, each maintaining separate immigration systems, legal systems, and even currencies.

Additionally, residents carry three different passports and ID cards, and speak two different forms of Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin).

They even drive on different sides of the road, presenting endless obstacles for those hoping to take a carefree road trip with each other.

Critics say some of these problems were brought to the fore when the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Bridge’s sister project, the $20 billion Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, opened in 2018.

This bridge connects the city of Zhuhai, in mainland China, with Macao, the gaming hub, and Hong Kong, the main financial center.

Even in 2019, a year after its launch, it was still struggling to attract traffic, recording just 4,000 trips a day, according to the Hong Kong Department of Transport. (For comparison, the Channel Tunnel in Europe, which connects France and Britain, attracted more than 8,000 vehicles on average a day in March this year, according to its website.)

Experts attribute the tepid response to the need for travelers to obtain different visas and vehicle registrations to travel between the three locations, especially as high-speed ferries already crisscross the three cities on a daily basis and depart from central terminals more often than not. accessible than the border areas where the bridges begin.

Traffic on the Hong Kong bridge has been reduced to just hundreds of vehicles a day during the covid pandemic as each of the three regions sealed their borders as part of a strict “covid zero” policy, although use has increased since then. During the Labor Day holiday this month, state media reported up to 9,000 vehicles crossing daily.

Meanwhile, the controversy over the bridges goes beyond purely financial issues.

Some see the bridges as a political act. Opponents criticize Hong Kong’s bridge as a means to force assimilation and exert control over the city, rocked by pro-democracy protests in 2014 and 2019.

Aerial view of the world’s longest sea bridge, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, in Zhuhai city, south China’s Guangdong province, March 19, 2019.

“Don’t worry, there will be traffic jams”

Even so, bridges also have their fans.

Xiao Geng, director of the Institute of Policy and Practice at the Shenzhen campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Bridge will help level the two areas.

“The western part of the coast is not as developed as the eastern, and there is also a huge discrepancy in property prices between the two,” Xiao said.

He also said the bridge was different from its predecessor, which had been beset by the “fundamentally different” systems of the three locations, which had put people off by driving up the cost of travel.

The latest bridge would connect two mainland Chinese cities that were already under the same regulations, he said.

“There is no need to worry. There will be traffic jams,” he said.

Additional reporting by ‘s Sarah Lazarus.