Homecoming: Every province has a northeast, and Guangdong is no exception

From Shenzhen to my hometown of Shaoguan, Guangdong, the straight-line distance is only 261 kilometers, and it takes only about 1 hour and 40 minutes to take the high-speed rail. If you travel in winter, in just over an hour, you will feel the difference in seasons. Every time I returned from Shenzhen during the Spring Festival, my parents always told me to bring one more piece of clothing to add to the car before the ride.

After all, Shaoguan is the only city in Guangdong province that can snow.

In a sense, Shaoguan is actually very un-Guangdong. In addition to the "four seasons like spring" that do not have Lingnan characteristics in the seasons, Shaoguan seems to be not "original" Guangdong in terms of food culture and local language. For example, most people have the impression that Cantonese people have a light diet, but there are many spicy dishes such as Meiling Goose King in the northern area of Shaoguan; Cantonese people should speak Cantonese, but Shaoguan people have a lot of Hakka dialects.

One side feeds the other. Shaoguan's "lack of Cantonization" is precisely determined by its geographical location and topography, and geographical differences also determine the past glory of Shaoguan and the current gloom of the city to a certain extent.

01

Once a good card

A long history is one of the major labels of Shaoguan. If you go back, 70 million years ago, Shaoguan Nanxiong was still a dinosaur world. In the Neolithic age, which they learned in junior high school history classes, the Maba people of Shaoguan also left their mark and flourished on this land as early as that time.

After historical records, Shaoguan still left a lot of ink and ink in history, which is often related to its important geographical location.

It connects Chenzhou City in Hunan Province to the northwest, Ganzhou City in Jiangxi Province to the northeast, and Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province to the south, and thus become an important transportation fortress for southbound and northbound travel.

Unlike other coastal cities in Guangdong, Shaoguan, located in the northern region of Guangdong, is a city surrounded by lofty mountains and mountains, surrounded by mountains on three sides, and mountains and hills occupy about 80% of the city's area.

And these tall mountains naturally formed a natural barrier for the princes to divide one side in ancient times. At the end of the Qin Dynasty and the beginning of the Han Dynasty, Zhao Tuo, the King of Wu of Nanyue, established a political power in Lingnan, and relied on the mountains of Dayuling and Weiling to hold the Western Han regime in Lingbei for nearly a hundred years, and was later destroyed by Emperor Wu of Han.

After reunification, the boundary mountains, which are easy to defend and difficult to attack, instantly become an obstacle to the free circulation of production factors, and merchants who want to transport goods must detour along the Xijiang River from Guangxi. In this regard, Han Yu, one of the eight great masters of the Tang and Song Dynasties, once sighed: "The rivers and rivers in Qujiang have been smelling for a long time, and I am afraid that it will be difficult to visit without knowing the name." ”

If you want to be rich, build roads first. Zhang Jiuling, a Lingnan student born and raised in Sichuan, felt that it was inconvenient to enter and leave Lingnan after he became the prime minister, and did not forget to give back to his hometown, so he asked him to dig the Meiguan Ancient Road to penetrate the north and south of Dayu Lingnan, one of the five great mountains of Nanling.

After this, ancient roads such as the Xijing Ancient Road and the Wuyi Ancient Road were excavated one after another, the obstructive effect of the Nanling Mountains was weakened, and the commercial activities in the Lingnan area became prosperous. Shaoguan, which borders Hunan and Jiangxi, has naturally become a transshipment and distribution center for logistics from the north to the south. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, this southern border city also became a famous tax customs, and Shaoguan was also named after it.

"A red dust concubine laughed, no one knew that it was a lychee coming." Lingnan's products, through the ancient road, have a larger market space, and the culture of Lingbei has also spread to the Lingnan region through the ancient road.

During the Southern Song Dynasty, a large number of people in the Central Plains moved south due to war and chaos, and when they crossed the Vietnamese ridge to Shaoguan, they settled down here. The lofty mountains are full of Hakka life footprints, and Shaoguan has become the birthplace of hundreds of surnames in Guangfu.

Shaoguan's status as a transportation hub continued for many years, and during the Northern Expedition, Dr. Sun Yat-sen set this place as the base camp of the Northern Expedition, and then after Guangzhou was captured by the Japanese, Shaoguan became the temporary capital of Guangdong.

After the founding of New China, the Beijing-Guangzhou Railway and the Beijing-Kowloon Railway passed through the city, and the Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railway, which connects the main artery of north-south transportation, did not fall into Shaoguan, a key stop.

In addition to the importance of transportation location, in terms of mineral resources, Shaoguan is also unique, especially famous for coal resources, iron ore resources, lead and zinc ore resources. According to statistics, in the entire area of Shaoguan, there are 130 million tons of coal (ore), 0.36 billion tons of iron (ore), 1.52 million tons of lead (metal); and 3.19 million tons of zinc (metal).

These rich mineral resources laid the foundation for Shaoguan's transformation from agriculture and logistics to industry in ancient times. Before the reform and opening up, the city became the leading steel industry city in South China. The state-owned enterprise Shaogang has also become a favorite place of work for many locals.

02

The embarrassment of transformation

According to such a trajectory, Shaoguan holds a good deck of cards with superior geographical location and rich resources, and in the subsequent urban competition, it should still be able to maintain its status as a famous city in Lingnan. However, in the decades after the reform and opening up, Shaoguan gradually lost its sense of existence in Guangdong Province.

According to the GDP data of various prefecture-level cities in Guangdong Province in the first three quarters of 2021, Shaoguan ranked 15th among the 21 cities in Guangdong Province with a total GDP of 110.656 billion yuan, ranking lower. In contrast, in the more than 40 years after the reform and opening up, Shenzhen has jumped from a small fishing village that has been unknown in history to a super large city with the largest GDP in Guangdong Province and the third largest in the country.

Population loss is an unavoidable problem of Shaoguan's economic growth. In 2020, the permanent population of Shaoguan area was about 2.855 million, an increase of only 28,500 in ten years, an increase of only 1.01%. The seven cities in the Pearl River Delta region have population growth in the ten years from 2010 to 2020, and the population growth rate is more than double digits. Among them, Shenzhen tops the Pearl River Delta with a growth rate of 68.47%.

The siphon effect of the Pearl River Delta region on the rest of Guangdong Province is undoubtedly enormous. The more economically developed Pearl River Delta not only has more complete infrastructure facilities, medical and educational resources are attractive enough, but more importantly, it has sufficient advantages of industrial support to provide more job opportunities in relatively underdeveloped areas.

After the reform and opening up, the location advantages of the Pearl River Delta have been fully utilized. In the past, Shaoguan was the northern gate of Guangdong to the Central Plains, and the market was in Lingbei; now, after joining the WTO, under the great wave of China's active participation in globalization, the cities in the southeast coastal area have instead achieved greater development.

Linhai brought the development of modern logistics industry in these cities, and Shenzhen became an important window for introducing foreign investment, absorbing overseas technology manufacturing and creating exports at that time because of its geographical advantages close to Hong Kong. With the accumulation of time, Shenzhen has gradually accumulated its own advantageous industries, such as finance, science and technology manufacturing, logistics, foreign trade, etc.

Through the distribution of the proportion of various industries in Shenzhen, it can be seen that Shenzhen is mainly driven by the secondary industry and the tertiary industry, and the proportion of agriculture in the primary industry is only 0.1%. With the rise of land costs in recent years, the proportion of manufacturing in Shenzhen's secondary industry has declined, but the proportion of the tertiary industry service industry has increased year by year.

In contrast, Shaoguan's industrial structure distribution is not so dependent on the tertiary industry, agriculture still accounts for more than 14%, while the tertiary industry such as consumption and services only accounts for about 34%. The tertiary industry is an industry that especially needs population to support, but the population flow has lost the more developed Pearl River Delta, and boosting the economy through the tertiary industry is a fantasy for other underdeveloped areas in Guangdong. This is also the reason why Shaoguan's per capita GDP also ranks at the bottom of guangdong province in various levels of cities - the secondary and tertiary industries can create higher GDP value.

In recent years, the land and labor costs of Pearl River Delta cities such as Shenzhen and Dongguan have increased, and related manufacturing industries have also begun to shift to inland cities with lower costs. But unfortunately, Shaoguan did not seize the opportunity. On the contrary, Ganzhou, Jiangxi, next door, has become more and more courageous in undertaking foreign science and technology manufacturing, and has successively won the investment and settlement quota of large manufacturing enterprises such as Geely and Foxconn.

In fact, Shaoguan is not without efforts to cooperate with Dongguan City to establish Dongguan (Shaoguan) Industrial Transfer Industrial Park, hoping to develop advanced equipment manufacturing industry with the help of the original steel resources. However, from the perspective of Shaoguan's positioning in Guangdong Province, the positioning of the "Northern Ecological Zone" is doomed to make shaoguan difficult to replicate its previous glory on the road of transformation from an old industrial base.

03

End

Watching their hometown gradually decline on the stage of history, no one will not feel sighing and strangling, but whenever they ask their friends around them whether they are still willing to stay in their hometown, most people shake their heads. It is an eternal truth that people go to a high place and water flows to a low place.

If the past glory is always used to define the current achievements, a city can never look forward. A city gradually loses its competitive advantage, and it must also be caused by subjective and objective reasons. In the past, the agricultural civilization existed for thousands of years, and the advanced manufacturing and service industries in China were only a few decades old, and the sun rose in the east and set in the west, which had its own laws. Ignoring the change in objective conditions and pursuing regional balance will only double the effort. I only hope that my hometown can find a suitable path, give play to its comparative advantages, and get better and better.

This article originated from Grand Gateway