A bridge too far?

It is 35km long, six lanes wide and intended to stimulate economic development. But the RMB30bn bridge that China and Hong Kong are planning to build across the Pearl River is already mired in controversy, reports Alexandra Harney

In April, after years of negotiations, officials from the former British colony and China agreed to a basic design for a bridge which is expected to be the second longest in the world. Only a bridge over Hangzhou Bay in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, which will span 36km when it is completed, will be longer.

The latest in a series of efforts by Beijing to link Hong Kong more closely with mainland China, the Y-shaped Pearl River bridge will connect Hong Kong’s Lantau island on the eastern side of the delta and the twin cities of Zhuhai and Macau in the west. Policymakers hope that by cutting transport time across the river from four hours to 20-30 minutes, the project will transform the relatively undeveloped western side of the delta.

Over the two-and-a-half decades since China opened to foreign investment in 1978, the western Pearl River Delta has languished because of poor transport links over the past two decades, as investment has poured into the east.

The reason: much of this investment has come from Hong Kong. Investors in the territory have travelled by car or train to manage operations in the east. The western delta, by comparison, can only be reached by driving north to the bridge at Humen or by boat.

As a result, Guangzhou, the largest city on the eastern side of the delta, reported RMB300bn in gross domestic product in 2002, compared with RMB118bn in the same year for Foshan, the biggest city in the west. Zhuhai, a sleepy seaside city, was so desperate for the benefits better transport connections would bring that it started to build a bridge across the delta itself in 1997. Without central government support, though, the project foundered.

The eastern delta’s boom, however, has created shortages of power, water, land and even labour, making it increasingly expensive to manufacture there. Hong Kong investors “are really looking for more inner areas for further development”, says Sarah Liao, Hong Kong’s secretary for the environment, transport and works.

The bridge’s supporters claim it will channel investment in manufacturing towards the west, helping companies in the east move into services and technology. “If a bridge were to allow [Hong Kong] to expand its exports of trade-related services and transportation services by just 10%, it could mean more than 57,000 jobs and US$2.56bn in additional service exports per year” based on 2001 figures for employment and trade in services, Michael Enright, Edith Scott and Ka-mun Chang write in their new book, Regional Powerhouse: The Greater Pearl River Delta and the Rise of China.

“When we realise that a bridge would be a long-lived investment, with a life of 30 to 40 years or more, we see that the value of a bridge to the region is likely to dwarf all the figures that have been estimated as the costs of such an undertaking,” they add.

A bridge across the delta would also ease pressure on the crowded border. In 2003, 233,000 people per weekday moved between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, the closest city in the eastern delta, according to government figures. That figure rose to 254,000 on weekends and holidays. The number of people crossing the border by car, as opposed to train, is also rising.

The border with Macau, where international investors are spending billions to set up world-class casinos, is increasingly crowded as well. “We have over 10m crossings from Hong Kong to Macau every year,” says Liao. “It’s a very busy channel… immediately, we can see that the bridge will not be underutilised from that sense.”

By 2020, the Hong Kong Government estimates 141,000 vehicles will cross the border each day, rising to 181,000 by 2030.

Figures like these worry environmentalists. They warn that by opening up the western delta to greater development and encouraging more vehicle traffic, the bridge will create additional air pollution in an area already choking on smog. They are also concerned the project will disturb the Pearl River’s rare population of pink dolphins and horseshoe crabs living in Tung Chung Bay, near the landing point on Hong Kong’s Lantau island.

Just how much the bridge will affect the environment is not clear. “The preliminary [environmental] studies… are not really very transparent,” says Andrew Thomson, chief executive of the Business Environment Council, a non-profit business association based in Hong Kong.

Assessing the impact

The Hong Kong Government is preparing an environmental impact assessment on top of the research it has already commissioned. Liao, a former environmental consultant, points to the Government’s experience in minimising the effects of other infrastructure projects on the dolphin population. During construction of Chep Lap Kok airport, the Government took pains to protect the dolphins. It has also created a marine sanctuary where the dolphins can breed and live.

Thomson believes the bridge will have less impact on the environment than the airport, which opened in 1997. “It’s not zero impact, but it’s within manageable bounds compared to other projects,” he says.

Criticism of the bridge, however, does not stop with environmentalists. Academics such as Hung Wing-tat, associate professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, question the Government’s insistence on using private funding for the bridge because it would require a significant loosening of the traffic restrictions across the border. The Government is expected to use a build-operate-transfer model, but has promised to take steps to regulate bridge tolls to prevent developers from charging too much.

Setting tolls at a level that is both affordable for lorries bringing goods across the border and profitable for the companies that develop the bridge will pose another challenge. The other border crossings are free. Hong Kong residents have shown themselves to be sensitive to additional costs: the Government’s May move to raise the toll at one of the tunnels under its harbour met with heavy public criticism.

Not to mention the practical challenges of issues such as speed limits and traffic controls: Hong Kong people drive on the left, while mainland Chinese residents drive on the right. Law enforcement also differs widely between Hong Kong and mainland China. In addition, because Hong Kong and Macau are considered separate customs territories from Zhuhai, customs processing for lorries could clog the flow of traffic across the border.

Enthusiasm

But none of these concerns has curbed the enthusiasm of developers such as Hopewell Holdings. The Hong Kong group’s chairman Gordon Wu, who led Hopewell to develop highways in the Pearl River Delta, has been the bridge’s most fervent advocate for years. International engineering groups, including France’s Vinci, are also understood to be eyeing the project.

The Hong Kong Government is expected to put out an international tender for the bridge soon. Beijing aims to start construction next year and have the bridge finished by 2010 - a speedy timetable by anyone’s standards, even in today’s fast-moving China. “They have a very, very tight schedule. Sometimes we almost think it’s impossible,” says Liao. “And then they do it.”

Alexandra Harney is the Financial Times’ South China Correspondent.