HONG KONG: Before the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge opened, a trip from Zhuhai to Hong Kong meant either taking the ferry for more than an hour or driving around the waters separating the two cities for three to four hours. That journey can now be made in about 45 minutes across the Lingdingyang Bay.
For Wang Jie, director of the Zhuhai Municipal Trade Service Center, the world’s longest cross-sea bridge, which is often described as “the project of the century”, is less of an engineering marvel and more of what she calls “a link woven into everyday life”.
Fresh produce from western parts of Guangdong province can now reach supermarkets in Hong Kong within half a day, while residents of Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions can drive to Zhuhai in Guangdong to buy flowers for Spring Festival, to visit relatives, or to simply spend a day in the mainland city and see how it has changed.
Wang recalled what one of her friends from Hong Kong told her: “Going to Zhuhai used to feel like a business trip. Now it feels like just going out.”
The bridge has changed a lot more than just reducing travel time. It has linked logistics, customs clearance and consumption more closely with everyday needs, making the integration of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area seem less like a planning term and more like a daily reality for residents and businesses.
Covering nine cities in Guangdong, as well as the Hong Kong and Macao SARs, the Greater Bay Area is one of China’s most open and economically vibrant regions. It is home to more than 87 million people and generates about one-ninth of the country’s economic output on less than 0.6 percent of its land area.
In 2025, the Greater Bay Area’s economic output topped $2 trillion, exceeding those of the New York and San Francisco bay areas and roughly matching the Tokyo Bay Area, placing it among the world’s leading bay area economies.
The Greater Bay Area also offers a window on China’s broader push for coordinated regional development. For a country of China’s size and diversity, narrowing gaps between regions and improving the balance of development have long been a major challenge.
President Xi Jinping has made coordinated regional development a key approach to addressing those challenges. He has given sustained attention to the development of the Greater Bay Area from an overall and long-term perspective. Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, he has made nine inspection tours to the region.
During an inspection tour in Guangdong in April 2023, Xi said the Greater Bay Area holds strategic importance in the country’s new development paradigm. He said the area must be developed as a strategic fulcrum of the new development pattern, a demonstration zone of high-quality development and a pioneer of Chinese modernization.
When inspecting Guangdong in November last year, Xi also urged efforts to deepen cooperation among Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao, strengthen collaboration in sci-tech innovation and infrastructure connectivity, and promote “soft connectivity” of rules and mechanisms.
He said that Guangdong should play its main and leading role, fully mobilize the enthusiasm, initiative and creativity of all parties, and better leverage the strengths of enterprises, professional service institutions, universities, research institutes and talent in different fields. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
