China's three main city clusters now basically originated from several rounds of economic movements after the reform and opening up, but nowadays there are new changes.
The Pearl River Delta region, needless to say, began with the development of the Shekou Industrial Zone in Shenzhen, which started with a three-to-four structure and formed an intensive manufacturing model. More representative, such as the high-tech zone in Nanshan, Shenzhen, and Songshan Lake in Dongguan. By 2008, the state began to intensively formulate regional planning, the Pearl River Delta Reform and Development Plan Outline came out of nowhere, the establishment of a quality living area as well as imitation of the Tokyo and Paris metropolitan area of the intercity rail system came out, so that the Pearl River Delta region began the process of systematic integration.
By last year, the nine cities in the PRD reached a GDP size of US$890 billion, and per capita also exceeded RMB 110,000 yuan. With the opening of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge just around the corner, the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong high-speed rail link soon to be operational, and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area rising to the status of a national strategy, the development goals are beginning to be benchmarked against the San Francisco, Tokyo, and other world-class Bay Areas. The shortcoming is that the Pearl River Delta, although the birth of Tencent, Huawei and other national world-class enterprises, but the chaos brought about by the traditional manufacturing industry, as well as environmental pollution, representative of the Sanshui talent market, is criticized. And the rest of Guangdong, also failed to rain on the parade, the level of development is almost behind the national average.
The Yangtze River Delta, by contrast, is much larger and stronger. Unlike Guangdong's early experimentation, the YRD region has a much stronger national will. The development of Pudong is typical, the township enterprises, industrial parks and top 100 counties in southern Jiangsu, and the private enterprises and Internet economy in Zhejiang all have their own very different development paths. As the mouth of the Yangtze River, the Yangtze River Delta region is expected to compete with the U.S. East Coast, led by New York, and has been studied repeatedly.
Unlike the Pearl River Delta, the YRD has a much thinner density of towns and cities, which are densely populated but do not have the richness that comes from being connected. And because it is divided into two provinces and one city, cooperation across administrative boundaries has not progressed favorably, with no updates except for Zhejiang's newly launched Hangzhou Bay Area concept and Shanghai's free trade port area.