Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Winners 2020 | Page 23

Hong Kong Young Writers Awards 2020
enhance their business promotion in the region. Better connectivity and greater cooperation
around the GBA will foster opportunities for new or renewed joint promotion opportunities.
These include opportunities in investment promotion, research and development, education,
medicine and healthcare, tourism, major events and promotion in specific industries. Third,
another expectation from the GBA in the future is they would like to create regional
development initiatives. New connectivity and cooperation inside and outside the GBA
should allow for regional development initiatives that might have been impractical until now.
At GBA, the future of transportation is very important. They understand that their clients
are no longer just looking for wider roads to accommodate more traffic. They are looking
for solutions that take technology and data to the next level to provide safety, efficiency
and cost savings. Resulting in safer roads and bridges, a more efficient trip to the grocery
store or hauling goods from one state to another. The GBA’s team of experts handle jobs
on every level including municipal, county, Department of Transportation, small mill-and-
overlays to highly complex interchanges and bridge design. The expansion of destinations
served by the high-speed rail from West Kowloon is likely to make the Hung Hom Station
redundant as a border crossing point. Allowing for potential opportunities for re-zoning and
re-development. China has fast-tracked further expansion of the CRH system, the network,
which extends to 30 of the country’s 33 provincial-level administrative divisions and runs for
29,000 km, is set to reach 38,000 km by 2025. Estimated at around 10 years later, the High
Speed Rail will be expanding to all eleven cities of the GBA and more mainland cities.
With improved connections between Mainland cities and the rest of the world, the ‘front
shop, back factory’ model of division of labour between Hong Kong and other GBA cities may
no longer be fully applicable, and a new mode of collaboration should be sought. We must bear
in mind that the development of the GBA is not at all a zero-sum relationship for the cities
involved. Rather, cities within the GBA should utilize their respective comparative advantages
in producing certain goods or services to supplement each other. For instance, some people
asserted that with close ties with global cities like Hong Kong, Foshan secured linkages to the
rest of the world. As a result, the latter could focus on the development of skills and capacity in
specialized sectors, such as lighting and furniture manufacturing. Should this recommendation
be adopted the eleven GBA cities can strengthen their industrial upgrading and integration
through the utilization of complementary resources and connections. By achieving this goal,
the development of the GBA will enhance the overall competitiveness of the region, which in
turn will contribute to the national economic growth.
Being part of the GBA and through the collaboration process, Hong Kong may find a
new direction for its economy to develop as well.
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