By Jerry Grey
Australian Freelance Writer
When I arrived in China in 2004, with a contract to work in the city of Zhongshan, I came into Hong Kong airport and used public transport for almost two hours to cross the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) to enter the Chinese Mainland at Shenzhen's Luohu. After arriving in Shenzhen, I got on a bus at a chaotic Luohu bus station and travelled over three hours into Zhongshan. Shenzhen, at the time, had no metro lines open; it now has 16 with 373 stations and 555 kilometres of lines. Incredibly, just 20 years later, the same journey today, takes me less than 90 minutes.
You don't often see me excited but this week, I was asked if I'd like to take a look at the "new bridge", there would be a media tour, and, if I'm interested, since I've helped my local newspaper, the Zhongshan Ribao (Zhongshan Daily) with some editing and a few interviews over the years, I could join the tour.
Wow, yes, I would be interested. I've been hearing about this bridge for many years and I've seen parts of it from a distance, it's very hard to miss if you travel around the Southern parts of Zhongshan, which I often do on my bike. It's also been featured many times on local, provincial and even national media and it opens today, the 30th of June.
This is a big event, it isn't an ordinary bridge, in fact, we shouldn't even call it a bridge. It's the Shen-Zhong Link, some people call it the Shen-Zhong Corridor because using the word bridge misses some very important details. It has the world’s longest and widest submersible tunnel, the world's highest above water level suspension bridge and several other world firsts – this isn't a bridge, this is an engineering marvel.
Guangdong and the Greater Bay Area (GBA) have some spectacular bridges, there's one from Hong Kong, all the way across the mouth of the Pearl River into Macau and Zhuhai, it's hard to miss that one, it's the "Great Wall of bridges" at 55 kilometres and encompassing three cable Stay (suspension) bridges, an undersea tunnel and four artificial islands, you would think it's very hard to beat but the Shen-Zhong Link beats it, not in length but in technological advances.
The Shen-Zhong Link is 24 kilometres long which makes this crossing just slightly less than 10 times the length of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge, at 91 metres about the water level, it's the highest over sea bridge in the world, the Golden Gate is 67m. Let's take nothing away from the construction of the Golden Gate, it was and still is iconic as well as being one of the greatest engineering feats of its time but it has to accept, it’s been knocked down a place on the list of the world's greatest feats of engineering.
The benefits to Marin County, on the opposite side of the Bay from San Francisco were enormous when the bridge was completed and the same is true of the Shen-Zhong Link. The GBA is a cluster of cities, all interconnected with high-speed rail, freeways and two other major bridges or links, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge and the Humen Bridge linking Guangzhou's Southern suburb of Nansha to Dongguan's Humen town, that one is an impressive 888 metres. What this new corridor brings is a link between the Southern part of Zhongshan, one of the smaller cities of the GBA with Shenzhen but also cuts the travel time from Shenzhen to Zhuhai, Jiangmen and beyond, considerably.
For now, only the Shenzhen to Zhongshan is open but when the link is fully operational, there will be an underwater interchange from the tunnel to head north into Nansha and therefore cut travelling time to Guangzhou and another road to Kaiping, which is part of Jiangmen – this really is cutting travel times between these major cities to about an hour where they used to be at least 3 and sometimes more than 5 hours apart.
People living in Zhongshan now have better choices, we can fly from Guangzhou or Zhuhai with about a 90-minute to 2-hour journey to those airports or we can now, within an hour, be at Shenzhen airport. Those people living in Shenzhen will have much better living options because less than an hour's drive from their offices and factories, the Zhongshan real estate prices are considerably cheaper than Shenzhen's and the toll fee is only 66 RMB, less than $10:00. As of the 1st July, the Golden Gate fee will be about the same, $10:25. There's also going to be a bus service taking passengers from Zhongshan straight into the heart of Shenzhen for only 18 RMB, that's less than $3:00 and from the bus stop there, it's possible to get anywhere in the city on one of their 16 metro lines. If you're looking for connectivity, the GBA really has it.
But it's the economic and trade benefits that make this connecting link worthwhile. Shenzhen is the creative capital of China, many, perhaps most, of the major Chinese corporations known to the world are based, or have large offices there; Zhongshan is one of the manufacturing capitals of China; there is a symbiotic relationship between design and creation which takes place in Shenzhen and the manufacturing, much of which takes place in Zhongshan and further West. Connectivity between Shenzhen, Dongguan and Huizhou on the East of the Pearl River with Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen and Zhaoqing in the West will improve by several hours.
There are also three Special Economic Zones (SEZs) around this link, Nansha in Guangzhou, Hengqin in Zhuhai and Qianhai in Shenzhen, the benefits of fast connections between these pockets of free enterprise cannot be underestimated, because of these SEZs, both Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions will also benefit from this additional link between the cities.
Being able to walk on the bridge and in the tunnel, explore the artificial islands and take photos and videos is an exciting opportunity, there is no doubt about that. But for Zhongshan, the city I call home, this is more than exciting, this is iconic, it's a symbol of future prosperity; the Shen-Zhong Link opening day, is a great day!
