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You're looking at the largest continuous urban area the world has ever seen. 86 million people fused into a single $2 trillion economic engine. It's known as China's Greater Bay Area. It's a bold, very ambitious attempt by the Chinese government to integrate 11 cities. For China, this is just the start. Its latest five-year plan pivots from individual cities to a focus on mega-regional China, a network of 19 massive clusters with the Greater Bay Area as a primary engine for growth.
China's relying a great deal on the Greater Bay Area to provide this kind of a powerhouse innovative economy with a long-term goal. Smaller cities connecting into larger ones goes back millennia, yet we're no longer talking about a few thousand merchants following a trade route, but instead, hundreds of millions of people integrated into a single labor market. Where gaps once took centuries to close, rail lines and relentless paving are swallowing the landscape at a rate of kilometers per day. After 6,000 years of urbanism, cities are becoming larger and larger.
Every single city is continuing to draw in more and more people for the kinds of opportunities that they can't get in any other sort of place. Economists believe that unifying the world's massive urban centers can revitalize economies and redefine the rules of growth. What happens here in China could be a blueprint for the future of humanity. This is China's Megalopolis Project.
For 99% of history, humans lived nomadically in small scattered groups. Then they began to settle. And 6,000 years ago, humans built the first cities. People came together and then gradually found more and more opportunities for employment, for education, and even for entertainment. And that promise is still true today. Cities offer jobs, drive innovation, and most importantly, they offer choice. They draw people in even though they have some objective disadvantages.
Cities can be crowded, polluted. We know that diseases can travel more quickly in a city, and yet you can't keep people out of them. The 11 cities within China's Greater Bay Area are some of the most productive economic centers in the world. They're among the most crowded, and the region is about to get even more densely packed. An entire metropolis is being built in a rural strip of land in Northern Hong Kong that will fill in the gaps, physically connecting Hong Kong to the larger, Greater Bay Area. On the north side, the Shenzhen side, you can see skyscrapers.
But then on the Hong Kong side, you see fish ponds, farmlands, a lot of green areas. These two territories are just separated by a rather narrow river. That river is the front line of what's branded as "Northern Metropolis," a utopian, multi-billion dollar plan to develop the area into a tech hub, housing everything from cutting-edge laboratories to promising startups while physically bridging the gap with mainland China. Development here used to trigger protests, but later after the government's imposition of its national security law and crackdown on mass democracy protests, local opposition more broadly has been silenced, removing potential obstacles for developers.
I think they're more of a state of resignation or acceptance, because they know that development will go ahead, all they can do is just accept their fate. I think the biggest loss will be the untouched wildlife areas, but most of all, the local communities. I born in this village in a house over there, which was a wooden hut. I was really born in that wooden hut. My mom would bring me here on weekends and all my uncles and their children were around here and they'd teach me farm things like how to build bonfires.
It's different looking over a public park than it is looking over a real wildlife, hilly area. Everywhere around it is starting lots of buildings and road is changing every day. And I think it, we won't be there, here for too long. For the Hong Kong farmers, the Northern Metropolis will proceed as planned with the government offering cash and public housing to relocate eligible farmers and villagers. But there is skepticism among local developers and Shenzhen's tech giants remain separated from Hong Kong by a real world border and clashing financial systems. I don't think the government can just say, oh, this will become the center of a city and people will move there.
We've seen that fail so many times all over the world. In China, that government-driven building led to ghost cities, massive infrastructure projects that lay empty for years. But over time, at least some of those projects did fill up, proving that if done in the right way, the "if you build it, they will come" method, can work. So when we think about what makes a planned or new city successful, we often should look right next door and see who its neighbors are. The emergence of a city is something that usually starts out as a village or a small town between places that are mapped out on the ground. So if we think about Shenzhen, that's right between Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
Shenzhen may be the fastest-growing planned city in human history. By the year 2000, a million people are expected to live in Shenzhen. By the year 2000, there were actually 7 million people living in Shenzhen. It's now a megacity of 18 million people that was essentially willed into existence by the Chinese government due to its strategic proximity to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, the capital city and cultural heart of China's southern Guangdong province. Basically, it seems like overnight China became a technological leader, largely due to Shenzhen and the cities in Guangdong.
We are about to start. Please make sure you're. AI, robotics, semiconductors, clean tech and autonomous driving. These are not just industries that the Chinese government is showing off to impress the world. They're actually important drivers for the future. Now, the Chinese government wants to build upon Shenzhen's success. For the 11 cities in the Greater Bay Area, that means utilizing each individual city's strengths to propel China towards a high-tech future driven by innovation. Let's say you're a startup in Shenzhen. You go to Hong Kong, raise money, use that money to create a prototype in Shenzhen. And from there, you know if it works, you make it in scale in Guangzhou, and then you launch it in Macau.
It sounds logical in theory, but getting the region to be a seamless, integrated economy could be much harder in practice. What makes it very interesting is Hong Kong and China you've got different political systems, common law, you know, socialist market economy, different tax regimes, visa regimes and all that. So how do you sort of merge these disparate systems? Hong Kong, which China considers one of the four core cities within the 11 strong Greater Bay Area, has its own legal system, currency and passports. And along with Macau is separated by a border. And that makes integration
through the Northern Metropolis Project a government priority. Northern Metropolis is the engine for us, not just for growth, for uplifting as well. Right. But this engine is part of a much larger, high-stakes transition for China. Away from things like textiles, cheap electronics, and a relentless boom in real estate. Those engines are faltering. Growth has slowed significantly as the country hits a wall known as "the middle income trap."
Moving from middle to high income requires a very steep increase in productivity. This is the ratcheting up of productivity of firms and labor that will move China from a middle-income to a high-income country over the next 10 years. Cities thrive when they don't have borders. Innovation succeeds through more integration, bringing together the people, the ideas, the customs. Information is exchanged through meetings, luncheons, mobility of labor. And that means you have to be within a half an hour, an hour of location, of economic activity. In this case, the location of innovative activities, and that is Shenzhen.
So I think it's become much more what I call an economic political objective, a regional program and has very many complex dimensions. While Hong Kong's loss of a distinct physical and political frontier is unique, its struggle might be a signal of what's to come. Across the globe, the individual city is being swallowed by something much larger. From the Abidjan-Lagos Corridor in Africa to the Northeast Corridor of the US, the world is gravitating towards the megaregions. But as the fish ponds are filled with concrete and the skyscrapers rise, what will be lost in the pursuit of a hyper-efficient future?
You should remember that some people like living like this. You take it for granted and then other people come and they've never picked something and then eaten it or touched a goat or a pig. It's something you won't know that you've got till it's gone. For some, dystopia is simply giving up natural land and old ways of life for the sake of development. But for others, that same development is a utopia, a necessary leap into a high-tech future. When people say, "can we be economically successful and not be a concentrated urban or regional center?" The answer is, "you cannot be."
People move to where the jobs are. The same thing is true in the United States. So the Greater Bay Initiative, the concept requires concentration of activities, but you can manage it well or you can manage it poorly, and your success depends upon whether you are able to do so. But a city's success isn't just about the political will to build it. It's about the people's ability to live in it. For China, the re-imagining of the urban landscape is an economic priority, and in a world where economic activity is naturally pulling towards massive clusters, China isn't just following the trend, it's attempting to engineer its outcome.
