Following the first proposal of "developing the economy of the Bay Area" in the Shenzhen Municipal Government Work Report in 2014, the integration or docking of the "Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area" has been written into the government work reports of Foshan, Zhaoqing, Jiangmen, Dongguan, Zhuhai and many other cities in the Pearl River Delta during the two sessions held this year.

 

This means that building the bay area economy will become the next stage of the Pearl River Delta region's important development strategy. As the first country to clearly define the "Bay Area", the Pearl River Delta Bay Area also undertakes the important task of exploring the economic development of the Bay Area for some coastal areas in the country.

 

Pearl River Delta "Bay Area"

 

In the international community, the term "Bay Area" is mostly used to describe the port group and town group formed by numerous seaports and towns distributed around the coastal ports, and the derived economic effect is called "Bay Area Economy".

 

According to a notice issued by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) last month, trans-provincial city agglomeration planning will be started in 2017 for the Pearl River Delta Bay Area, the west coast of the Taiwan Strait, Guanzhong Plain, Lanzhou-Xining, and Hubao, Eyu and other regions.

 

"Pearl River Delta" or "Pearl River Delta Region" is expressed as "Pearl River Delta Bay Area", which appears for the first time in national documents. An official from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said the "Pearl River Delta Bay" city cluster will be planned by the nine Pearl River Delta cities, Hong Kong and Macao as a whole. It will be led by the NDRC and jointly worked out by Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao, and finally approved by the State Council.

 

In fact, the concept of a "Bay Area" is not new. Some cities with developed ports in China, such as Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Dongguan, and Taizhou, have long joined the ranks of developing the Bay Area economy.

 

Hu Gang, professor of Jinan University and president of South China Society of Urban Studies, said in an interview that the formulation of the NDRC document is in line with China's overall development strategy of high and new technology and will drive the country's economic transformation and upgrading. "Unlike in the past, the development of high-tech needs to rely on high-tech talents, talents like to gather in the climate environment conditions good places, such a place is the Bay Area. Just as the San Francisco Bay Area, because of the pleasant climate and the concentration of high-tech talent, so the rapid development of science and technology, this has attracted the attention of the world, but also attracted the attention of China."

 

Its GDP is bigger than Spain's

 

Not only the Pearl River Delta, China also has Bohai Bay, Hangzhou Bay, Jiaozhou Bay, Beibu Bay and many other bay areas. Among them, the Bohai Rim Bay Area with Beijing and Tianjin as the "dual core" and the Hangzhou Bay Area and the Pearl River Delta Bay Area with Shanghai as the core are well developed at present.

 

"Relatively speaking, the PRD Bay Area has a high urban population density, the 11 cities in it have all entered a mature stage of development, and the PRD has a more comprehensive technological development element -- strong high-tech, traditional manufacturing and service industries, etc." "Hu Gang analyzed.

 

Peng Peng, vice president of the Guangdong Institute of System Reform and a senior researcher at the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences, believes that the Pearl River Delta Bay Area has an advantage because it is more convenient for Hong Kong, Macao and the rest of the world to connect with each other.

 

As the first bay area recognized at the national level by the world's second largest economy, the PRD bay area is expected to be a world-class bay area.

 

The above-mentioned official from the National Development and Reform Commission mentioned that from the perspective of the spatial pattern of urban agglomerations around the world, the urban agglomerations in the Coastal Bay Area are the most competitive urban agglomerations with the best conditions for development. The Pearl River Delta Bay Area urban agglomeration has the most such international characteristics. He believes that the Pearl River Delta Bay Area will be the most developed urban agglomeration in the world, as well as the most innovative and open urban agglomeration.

 

From 2011 to 2015, the GDP of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) Bay Area increased year by year, from 6.24 trillion yuan in 2011 to 8.44 trillion yuan, or about 1.22 trillion U.S. dollars, according to data compiled by the regional statistics bureau and the International Monetary Fund. That's about the same as the GDP of Australia, the 13th-ranked economy in 2015, $23.8 billion more than Spain, the 14th, and $100 billion less than Russia, the 12th.

 

Greater attention should be paid to the livability of the Bay Area

 

Compared with the target three world-class bay areas, the PRD bay area has the problems of single industrial structure and insufficient scientific research capacity. Hu Gang said that the industrial structure of the PRD Bay Area still tends to be labor-intensive, with traditional manufacturing taking up the majority, while there is still a gap in high-tech industries.

 

"Shenzhen's high-tech is mainly application-oriented technology, and its original technology and R&D capability lags far behind that of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area. The PRD Bay Area's scientific research, innovation and entrepreneurship environment also needs to be improved. However, the Pearl River Delta Bay area in the industrial division of labor has been relatively clear." He first said.

 

On the other hand, in the process of building the Bay Area economy, the integration construction is both the focus and the difficulty. The "Bay Area" is more blurred than the "region" of cities, with more emphasis on integrated development, such as infrastructure connectivity, equal public services, and similar levels of consumption.

 

In addition, the Pearl River Delta (PRD) Bay Area, the third largest label for the Bay Area, is not "livable" enough. Li Zhiming, a member of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, told reporters that all government decisions should be people-centered and based on the needs of residents, so that the direction will not be wrong.