, Columnist
A Bridge Alone Can’t Unify Hong Kong With China
The Oresund link between Denmark and Sweden shows you need more than gleaming infrastructure to drive integration.
There are still borders.
Photographer: Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images
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What’s the most important bit of infrastructure to connect an international metropolis like China’s Pearl River Delta? A demolished border post.
For all the excitement around the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge Wednesday, that’s probably the best lesson to draw from Beijing’s plan to draw Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Dongguan, Foshan and other cities into a single megalopolis. As my colleague Nisha Gopalan wrote last month, “Build it and they will come” is a lot easier said than done.