Our Desk | Hengqin the new ‘El Dorado’?

Renato Marques

History says that when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas around 1492, the moment marked one of the first chapters of the world’s clash of cultures.
Reports for those times depict a brutal confrontation of opposing cultures; opposing ways of living and systems of beliefs.
Around the same time, a myth started to circulate in Europe about a certain lost city made of gold that was waiting to be discovered by a brave conqueror somewhere in South America.
For some historians, the myth of the ‘El Dorado’ – the name attributed to this alleged lost city – was just a metaphor, very commonly written in texts at the time, that ultimately symbolized a certain “gold rush” that led the European maritime superpowers of Portugal and Spain to fight for as many pieces of land as they possibly could in the Southern American continent.
At the same time, most common people, who were not aware of the tricky metaphorical symbol, truly believed in the existence of an actual city made of gold waiting to be conquered.
This fact, while misleading in its essence, worked as an important driver to keep people’s hopes high and, ultimately, meant that those who ran these dangerous sea expeditions across the globe never lacked motivated manpower or investors.
A similar process seems to be occurring right next door to Macau with the rising fame of Hengqin Island. Although we are not exactly discovering new land, we are in a way exploring new opportunities that an old land seems to have gained through the magical power of the Central government’s newly designated roles.
The fact is, just like over 500 years ago with El Dorado, a ruler decided that a certain piece of land would have added advantages for his country and rule, and sent people to dig for that gold.
This new gold is not in a form of the precious metal, but in another kind of marketable good – real estate.
Similar to the old European times, rumors (purposely) spread faster than actual news, and the abstract ideas of a “finance center,” a “high tech hub,” and many others that you can find in official and (often) unofficial speeches led to a similar “gold rush” for this new El Dorado.
Historians discovered and confirmed after many years that El Dorado was not a place, but a person, a ruler so rich that he allegedly covered himself in gold from head to toe each morning and washed it off in a sacred lake each evening.
In the very same way, we also might find out a little too late that Hengqin might just be, and continue to be for many decades to come, what it is now – a construction site where hundreds of construction projects are being undertaken at the same time giving a deceptive idea of fast-paced progress.
What if Hengqin is just preparing to become another Chinese ghost city?
According to the latest unofficial figures, there are as many as around 50 municipalities in the mainland that have been classified as “ghost cities,” places that, just like Hengqin, were subjected to fast-paced real estate development and where virtually nobody lives.
Abandoned after years of construction, these cities are the opposite of progress, except for the developers who completed their projects and benefited from investors’ money.
According to a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, there are “as many as 64 million empty apartments in China.”
In his book “China’s Great Wall of Debt,” Dinny McMahon explained the driving force behind the construction of these cities, saying that developers build housing in places that end up being ghost cities because they believe in the ability of the Chinese property market to only grow and never fall.
Eventually, some of these “ghosts” turned out just fine some 20 or 30 years after being initially built. Are the Hengqin investors aware of this time gap?