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The first idea to build a bridge connecting Hong Kong and mainland China was conceived by one of Hong Kong's largest real estate developers: Sir Gordon Wu.
The mogul proposed this connection in 1983 When the metropolis continued to be a British colony, it had to wait another two decades before Beijing and the local authorities accepted the feasibility of the work.
And yesterday, the structure linking the financial center and the mainland city of Zhuhai was inaugurated. At a ceremony attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping, this showed the huge significance of the bridge for Beijing.
This monumental engineering effort is the largest martial bridge in the world. In the shape of a snake, it stretches for 55 km and has considerably reduced the time required to travel from Hong Kong to Zhuhai City and the neighboring city of Macao, thus linking the two autonomous Chinese cities to nine others. cities of Guangdong Province. on the continental territory.
As head of the Hong Kong Transport Department, Frank Chan Fan, explained Friday at a meeting with the press that the journey between this population and the west of this vast region clustered around The delta of Ro Perla – the third longest in the Asian nation – will be reduced by about three hours. "The journey between Zhuhai (one of the mainland) and Hong Kong Airport, which now takes four hours, will be reduced to about 45 minutes, as will the one between Zhuhai and the Kwai container terminal. Tsing, one of the major trading centers of the former English colony) has gone from 3.5 hours to just 75 minutes, "said the representative.
The Beijing project is to promote the development of a region for trade, business and tourism, which they already called the Grand Baha region, with 56,500 km {+2} and 68 million inhabitants.
Erected to withstand a Level 8 earthquake, a typhoon with a wind speed of 340 km / h and large vessel collisions, the project required 400,000 tons of steel, 4.5 times more than the one used for the San Francisco Golden Gate. The route includes 6.7 km of underground road to avoid the route most frequented by the transport navies, which connect two artificial islands each occupying 100 000 m {2} of livestock to the sea.
the figure of Gordon Wu, a character who has always been aligned with Beijing's policy against former colonial forces, and the same bridge have been persecuted for years by controversy, as recalled on southern China on Monday. Morning Post in his editorial. "It has been full of technical challenges, exorbitant costs, environmental problems, fatal accidents, frauds and delays," wrote the Hong Kong morning newspaper.
Last year, several groups of workers organized a demonstration after a fatal accident and came to describe the work as "mbad murder". The opposition legislator, Nathan Law, estimates that at least a dozen workers have died since 2011 and that 600 people were injured in the part attributed to Hong Kong companies, figures that the local government has halved. Similar statistics referring to the area of responsibility of the mainland have never been known.
The cost of the project, to be inaugurated in 2016, will rise to 20,000 million US dollars, generating a new alluvium of criticism among local Hong Kong officials that calls into question the need for this design. . In addition, the local government admitted several months ago that the number of pbadengers crossing this crossing every day had been reduced by 26% in 2030 and that it remained at 126,000 people, due to the 39; opening in 2024 of another similar bridge. and the competition of the new Chinese high-speed line that reaches Hong Kong.
For advocates of the political particularity of Hong Kong, the bridge is much more than a steel and cement frame and has a clear connotation. policy aimed at highlighting the financial center's link with the continental territory. MP Claudia Mo, opposed to Beijing's attempt to reduce Hong Kong's autonomy, said that it "founded" the locality "on the vast map of China". "It 's like a psychological weapon, an umbilical cord that connects Hong Kong to the homeland, every time you go to Hong Kong, you first see this gigantic bridge in the ocean" he says.
RPIDA CONEXIN The bridge reduces the journey between Zhuhai and Hong Kong in about 3 hours.
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