The Pearl River Delta (PRD) megalopolis is one of the largest and fastest growing urban regions in the world. This massive urban agglomeration is located in Guangdong, a province in Southern China. It consists of 11 independent but highly interconnected cities situated around Guangdong province's Pearl River Delta Bay, the estuary where the 3rd longest river in China ends and discharges into the South China Sea.

Satellite image of the Pearl River Delta

The PRD megalopolis is an urban area of gargantuan proportions with few like it in existance. It's home to 65 million people, a population similar to that of the United Kingdom. It covers an area around 55,000 km^2, about the size of the country of Croatia. The GDP of the PRD megalopolis clocks in at over $1.2 trillion, about the same as Mexico. Although the PRD megalopolis makes up about 4.3% of China's population, it contributes to 9.1% of the country's GDP, a whopping 26.9% of its exports, and 7.5% of its total retail sailes of consumer goods. The PRD megalopolis is big in every way, but far from fully grown and in fact just hitting its stride.

Yet the massive and fast growing urban entity that is the PRD megalopolis might not have existed if not for major political and economic shifts in China that began in 1978.

How does the Pearl River Delta compare to countries? field data Comparable Country Population 65,000,000 United Kingdom GDP $1,200,000,000,000 Mexico GDP per capita $18,500 Greece PPP per capita $36,000 Israel Area 55,000 km^2 Croatia Density 1,190 / km^2 Bangladesh

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A Brief Background

Before 1978, the Pearl River Delta area, like most of China, was primarily rural (just 28% urban) with a poor economy based on agriculture. China had never experienced an industrial revolution like in the US, Japan, and many European countries. Furthermore, China had suffered devastating losses and damages during WW2. Following the war, China's own poor governance had mired the country's recovery and growth. Famines were a common occurance and culminated in the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961), which led to the starvation of millions. China was in dire straits. But the country's outlook improved after Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978.

Unlike his predecessors, Deng Xiaoping was much more practical. He said "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice". In other words, he didn't care about your ideological leanings as long as you were competent and efficient. Not long after Deng Xiaoping became the paramount leader of China in 1978, he passed economic reforms that loosened government control of the economy and opened up the country to trade and investments. One of his most successful ideas was the establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZ), areas of looser economic regulations than the rest of China. In 1980, one of the first SEZ was established in Shenzhen, then a small town just north of Hong Kong in the Pearl River Delta.

Deng Xiaoping billboard in Shenzhen

Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms were a wild success, to say the least. China transformed itself from a dirt poor country in 1978 to become the world's second largest economy. Between 1978 and 2013, China's gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an incredible rate of 9.5% per year. At the forefront of China's economic charge was the Pearl River Delta region, which received almost 30% of all foreign investments and grew at an even faster rate of 13.5% per year. Today, the Pearl River Delta's GDP clocks in at over $1.2 trillion, ahead of countries like Mexico and Indonesia, making it the 15th largest economy in the world.

Fueled by its red hot economy, the Pearl River Delta region has grown from a patchwork of cities into the PRD megalopolis, one of the fastest growing and largest urban area in the world. It consists of 5 major metropolitans including Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan and Guangzhou along with 6 smaller cities made up of Macau, Zhaoqing, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou, and Zhongshan. Although the population of the PRD megalopolis is estimated to be around 65 million, because data is poor on internal migrants, some estimates place the population of the area to be as high as 120 million, good enough to make it the 12th most populated country in the world after Japan.

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Rise of the PRD Megalopolis

To give you more perspective on the colossal urban buildout underway in the PRD megapolis, here are some interesting facts. The PRD megalopolis has more buildings over 150 m (492 ft) than any country in the world except China itself and the United States. The PRD megapolois has laid 356 kilometers of high-speed rail track, making it the 14th longest high-speed rail system in the world. Furthermore, the combined length of the subway metro systems in the PRD megalopolis exceeds every country in the world except the US, Japan, South Korea, and Russia.

The explosive growth of the PRD megalopolis has not gone without notice. Chinese government officials and business leaders have hatched a plan to further integrate the PRD megalopolis. The Greater Bay Area initiative, as laid out in China's 13th Five-Year Plan, aims to achieve this by pouring investments into infrastructure projects. The goal is to create a "one-hour living circle" where someone in Guangzhou can travel to any other place in the PRD megalopolis within an hour. Some key infrastructure projects include the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge and Shenzhen-Zhongshan Bridge (est. 2021), two of the world's longest cross-sea bridges, and further work on the Pearl River Delta Metropolitan Region Intercity Railway System, a high-speed rail project that will connect every city in the PRD megalopolis.

The hope is that more integration will allow the PRD megalopolis to scale even further and harness more benefits from urban agglomeration. These benefits include greater labor specialization, lower transportation costs, a larger and more accessible pool of consumers and trained workers, and the accumulation of knowledge and human capital. If everything goes according to plan, by 2030 the GDP of the PRD megalopolis will grow to $4.62 trillion, making it larger than the economies of rival bay areas in Tokyo, New York, and San Francisco.