In a village on Hong Kong’s outskirts, Wong Chin Ming inspects zucchini, watermelons, cherry tomatoes and kale growing in his greenhouses. For 19 years he’s been raising crops here on the site of what was once a factory. Soon his farm will be wiped off the map to make way for a massive development, which China hopes will be Hong Kong’s answer to Silicon Valley. The government is setting aside 300 square kilometers (116 square miles) for the project, an area more than twice the size of San Francisco.
It’s called “Northern Metropolis,” yet, for now, it’s anything but. Hong Kong’s hinterland is a hodgepodge of sleepy hamlets, apartment blocks and stray dogs. Rusty fences surround warehouses, abandoned cars lie in bushes, and scores of cabins built to quarantine patients during the Covid-19 pandemic sit empty. Northern Metropolis won’t grow organically over decades like California’s storied tech hub near Stanford University or the glittering skyscrapers of Hong Kong, where companies and citizens had enjoyed greater autonomy from Chinese Communist Party rule before the government cracked down in 2020.
