Southeast China’s new airport could challenge Hong Kong
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, December 13, 2003
GUANGZHOU, China — With its glitzy American-designed terminal and twin 2.5-mile-long runways, Guangzhou’s new multibillion-dollar Baiyun International Airport is merely the latest major transportation project to grace southern China’s Pearl River Delta — one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
It will be the area’s fifth airport in recent years and will be able to handle the world’s largest commercial aircraft — the Airbus 380 — and nearly 30 million passengers a year when it opens next fall. Some believe that the new airport, with ambitions to become a hub for the Southeast Asia region, could become a direct challenge to Hong Kong’s 5-year-old international airport less than 100 miles away.
"Our biggest competitor is Hong Kong," Rena Huang, a Baiyun airport official, said as she led a group of foreign reporters through the nearly completed main terminal. "Right now, Hong Kong is the transit point between China and the rest of the world, but we’ve got a lot of things going for us."
With a population of about 10 million, Guangzhou is already one of the largest cities in southern China and the provincial capital of Guangdong province. It is also the administrative center for the delta, where cheap labor, modern infrastructure and efficient links to the outside world have made it one of the most attractive manufacturing centers in the world.
Other ambitious transportation projects are under way, including a $110 million bridge and tunnel system linking Hong Kong with the mainland border city of Shenzhen.
During the first nine months of this year, the province drew $12.6 billion in direct foreign investment and conducted more than $200 billion in foreign trade, according to Guangdong’s governor, Huang Huahua. And this in a year when the pneumonialike SARS illness slowed economic activity to a crawl for two months last spring.
"We’re growing at (an annual rate of) 13.3 percent", he said.
At present, about 85 percent of the traffic at Guangzhou’s existing airport consists of domestic flights, but those involved with Baiyun International — 12 miles from the downtown area — said they hope to change that in the years ahead.
"We predict we’ll have increased international travel," said Huang. Evidence of this push came earlier this month when Air France, together with Guangzhou-based China Southern Airlines, announced plans to inaugurate nonstop service to Paris next month. It would be the first nonstop service linking the delta metropolis with a major Western city.
