JULY/AUGUST 2019 businesstraveller.com

n the 42nd f loor of the 330-metre-high Zhuhai

Tower, in the reception of the opulent St Regis

Zhuhai hotel, an enormous mural occupies an

entire wall opposite the reception desks. The

mural depicts part of Zhuhai in the early 1900s,

showing a beautiful village at the bottom

of a verdant hillside. Rong Hong, the first

Chinese student to graduate from an American

university (Yale), is strolling away from the

town and towards the viewer of the painting. Not far

behind him, two children can be seen playing. Behind

the town, the ocean is filled with sailboats.

This, one of the hotel staff tells me, is what the area

surrounding Zhuhai Tower used to look like, but now

it’s unrecognisable when compared with the painting.

All traces of the village seem to have disappeared,

and the area is now being developed by state-owned

enterprise Zhuhai Huafa Group. There are three major

hotels (including the St Regis) in the vicinity, as well as a

huge convention and exhibition centre.

“When I was little, Zhuhai was just a very small city,

very few people were here, and I could not see a lot of

high buildings. It was just like the countryside, but now

it’s quite different, especially in this area,” says Angel

Huang, marketing officer at the Zhuhai International

Convention & Exhibition Center.

The centre’s largest and most prestigious function

room, the 4,500 sqm and 12.6-metre-high Zhuhai Hall,

tends to be rented for provincial government functions.

Even some large multinationals have balked at the

expense of renting out this expansive area, PR officer

Lehong Chen tells me during a tour.

The centre occupies a footprint of 269,000 sqm and

a gross f loor area of around 970,000 sqm (split into two

phases). It has recently hosted events including The

3rd China-Israel Investment Summit, Walmart’s New

Year Celebration Meeting and a FAW-Volkswagen New

Sagitar Press Conference.

Zhuhai is now a city of around 1.6 million people,

which may seem large to some but is relatively small

by Chinese standards. By comparison, Beijing and

Shanghai are home to well over 20 million people each.

However, Zhuhai is likely to rise in prominence both

in China and internationally in the coming years, due

to its integral positioning in the Chinese government’s

Greater Bay Area (GBA) initiative. The city also has

a unique advantage over the other cities in the GBA:

the 55-kilometre Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge,

opened in October 2018, makes Zhuhai the only

mainland Chinese city linked directly to both Macau

and Hong Kong by land.

Major industries in Zhuhai include digital

information, biomedicine, home appliances, electric

energ y, petrochemicals, precision machinery and

travel, says Harley Seyedin, president of The American

Chamber of Commerce in South China. “We can

observe from this unique blend that the city is ready to

become the dark horse of the Greater Bay Area,” he says.

‘When I was little, Zhuhai was just a very small city,

very few people were here, and I could not see a lot of

high buildings... Now it’s quite different’

ABOVE AND

OPPOSITE PAGE:

Zhuhai

International

Convention &

Exhibition Center,

with Macau in the

background;

and Zhuhai Tower

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