HONG KONG (Reuters) – Some Hong Kong officials and lawmakers are encouraging younger residents to consider living across the mainland China border so that they can escape the territory’s sky-high apartment prices and find more job opportunities. It is not an easy sell but some pro-China business leaders say resistance to the idea will eventually crumble.
The government has seized upon a Beijing plan to integrate the former British colony into the Pearl River Delta to create the Greater Bay Area, a region comprising nine cities in China’s Guangdong province, plus Hong Kong and Macau, that would have the equivalent of the fifth-largest economy in the world by 2030 and a population of nearly 70 million. Hong Kong’s population is currently about 7.4 million.
Moving to one of those other cities would mean that Hong Kong’s millennial generation, many of whom have been priced out of Hong Kong’s housing market, could afford to buy their own homes or rent more than a shoe box. They would also have a wider range of jobs to choose from.
They may, though, miss the freedoms of Hong Kong that are guaranteed under a “one country, two systems” system for the 50 years after the British handover of the territory to China in 1997. In Hong Kong, for example, the media and the Internet are relatively freewheeling, while in China they are censored vigorously.
A further diffusion of people who are Hong Kong born and bred into the mainland may dim support for the pro-democracy movement in the territory, especially if more rich Mainlanders move into Hong Kong to replace them.
But Beijing has made it clear that economic integration is key to reinforcing its sovereignty over Hong Kong – and it gets support from within the business community.
“We will no longer be Hong Kong people, but Greater Bay Area people,” Jonathan Choi, Chairman of the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce of Hong Kong, told the Hong Kong Economic Times last month. “We should therefore focus on integration rather than on the interests of Hong Kong,” said Mr Choi, who is also a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the top advisory body to China’s parliament.
A series of major infrastructure projects due to be finished in the next three months are going to connect major cities in the region through fast trains and road bridges, reducing the time to commute to and from Hong Kong significantly.
“That distance, I believe, will no longer be a problem once they have learned about the latest progress of our growing transport infrastructure links with the Bay Area,” Hong Kong Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung said in a blog in June titled, “Debunk the myths over Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area”.
The migration has already been happening. At least 500,000 Hong Kong people resided in the mainland last year, up from 155,000 in 2009 and just 62,000 in 2003, according to official data.
It is a stunning transformation from the days only 40 years ago when the Pearl River Delta was more of a sleepy, poor agricultural region that was not much more than a curiosity to people in Hong Kong. It is now one of the world’s industrial engines, whose cities have among the highest per capita incomes in China.
Property agents in southern China said they had seen a jump so far this year in the number of Hong Kong people looking to buy homes across the border, especially in cities such as Zhuhai and Zhongshan, although most were sophisticated investors rather than the youth the government is targeting. One said the increase had been as much as 40 percent.
Jackie Chan, a Hong Kong investor unrelated to the movie star of the same name, bought a home in the southern Chinese city of Zhongshan in April, betting that Beijing’s backing of the Bay Area plan was sure to bolster prices.
