A “Greater Bay Area” refers to a cluster of ports and urban clusters distributed around coastal ports. The derived “Greater Bay Area economy” has become an important highlight in the world economic landscape. The San Francisco Bay Area is renowned for Silicon Valley and has attracted tech giants such as Google, Apple, and Tesla. The New York Bay Area is famous for the financial strength of Wall Street, with one-third of the top 500 largest companies in the United States located there. In comparison, China’s Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has a unique structure of “one country, two systems, three customs territories, three currencies, and four core cities”, and it serves as a crucial node for China to connect the domestic and international economic dual circulation. During the Third Session of the 14th People’s Congress of Guangdong Province held in Guangzhou from January 15th to 18th, 2025, both the work report of the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress and the government work report listed the construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as the top priority of the year, proposing the development path of “complementary functions – legislative protection” to promote the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to deepen from geographical proximity to institutional coordination, striving to build a world-class first-rate Greater Bay Area.
Since the reform and opening up, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has already formed a division of labor system with industrial complementarity. For instance, Hong Kong mainly focuses on service industries such as international finance, international trade, and international shipping. Macao mainly develops the tourism and cultural industries, and the mainland cities mainly concentrate on technology manufacturing. However, if the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area aims to achieve further development, it still needs to deepen the division of labor system. This proposition has been verified in the 2025 government work report.
According to the 2025 Guangdong Provincial Government Work Report, to strengthen the major cooperation platforms in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao, it is necessary to support Shenzhen’s Qianhai in collaborating with Hong Kong and Macao to create a new high-quality and efficient modern service industry system. Since the Qianhai Plan first added the “Pilot Zone for In-depth Integration and Development between Shenzhen and Hong Kong” as a new strategic positioning for Qianhai, Qianhai has collaborated with Hong Kong and Macao to develop the headquarters economy, focusing on the fields of finance and technology services, and formed a cluster of high-end service industries. Specifically, in terms of finance, Qianhai has accelerated the formation of a new pattern of “Six Connects” in Shenzhen-Hong Kong financial cooperation, namely, Shenzhen-Hong Kong account connectivity, exchange connectivity, financing connectivity, cross-border wealth management connectivity, cross-border credit reporting connectivity, and service connectivity. In terms of technology, Qianhai took the lead in introducing the “Several Measures to Support the High-quality Development and High-level Application of Artificial Intelligence” and created a number of “China’s firsts” in the field of artificial intelligence. By the end of December 2024, Qianhai had gathered 258 artificial intelligence enterprises, forming a cluster of innovative artificial intelligence application enterprises represented by SMOORE Technology, Pony.ai, Insta360, etc.
In addition to industrial planning, the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress of Guangdong Province has “tailored” the first special legislative plan in the country to implement major national regional development strategies for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, clarifying that about two Greater Bay Area regulations will be introduced each year. According to the work report of the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress of Guangdong Province, the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress of Guangdong Province plans to arrange the deliberation of 19 regulations in 2025. For example, it is planned to formulate the Regulations on Rail Transit in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to provide special legislative guarantees for the “Greater Bay Area on Railways”. Promote the “integration of four networks” of rail transit, that is, by promoting the integration of the trunk railway network, intercity railway network, urban (suburban) railway network, and urban rail transit network, to build an urban agglomeration and metropolitan area on the railway.
Driven by the two-way forces of “soft connectivity” and “hard rules”, the Greater Bay Area is attempting to transform institutional diversity into an advantage of collaborative innovation, injecting new impetus into urban economic development. This practical exploration may redefine the development paradigm of a world-class Greater Bay Area.
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