In 1992, early spring in the south!

Li Xuan stood on the roof of Cai Kee Seafood Building, looking at the deep-sea special zone at the other end of the bay through the blue and gray water. The bay in front of him is called Houhai, and the winding coastline is not golden sand beaches and surfing tourists, but just craggy reefs and mangrove forests.

People who don't live by the sea may be puzzled that mangroves are not red at all, just some green trees and shrubs that grow on the seashore. These patches of seaside trees are called "mangroves" because they are rich in "tannins", which quickly oxidize and turn red when they are cut down.

Except for the mangrove forests, which are not considered scenic spots, even the waters of Deep Bay are not the pleasing blue of the sea. This is because the entire Lingdingyang Bay Area, including Houhai, is the estuary of the Pearl River, and the large amount of sediment washed down by the river has smeared the blue water into a blue-gray color.

Therefore, the scenery of Houhai is not beautiful, and Li Xuan does not look at the sea to enjoy the scenery, but to witness a great historical moment, which is a new chapter in the story of spring. An elderly man came to the Shenhai Special Zone for the third time, and one of his trips today was to inspect the Shenhai Electronics Industrial Park across the bay.

Li Xuan didn't know how the old man's itinerary was arranged in another time and space. But he knew very well that the special zone in that time and space did not have such a large-scale electronics industrial park that almost supported the backbone of deep-sea industry.

For this reason, Li Xuan is also quite proud, his little butterfly has changed at least some things!

In fact, the changes it has brought are far more than a deep-sea electronics industrial park, and even the seafood restaurant he is standing in now is not available in another time and space. Yuen Long, another time and space, was regarded by Hong Kong people as a remote countryside until the 90s, and ghosts would go to the backsea in the wilderness to eat seafood.

But this life is different, because of the rise of Hong Kong's high-tech electronics industry, Yuen Long is now not only the most important core industrial area in Hong Kong, but also the fastest growing urban sub-center in Hong Kong. Along with the entire northwestern New Territories, the pace of development in the past seven or eight years has been like a rocket.

The land in the Tin Shui Wai Industrial Park was actually depleted a few years ago, so the new factory spread across the entire Yuen Long perimeter like a cancer spread. It is important to know that the level of development in Yuen Long is far less than that of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.

In another time and space, even twenty or thirty years later, there are still large areas of wasteland and farmland in the western and northern New Territories, including Yuen Long and Fanling. Therefore, to say that Hong Kong's land resources are scarce, to a certain extent, is actually a false proposition.

However, many things in the New Territories are far more complicated than those in urban areas, and the legacy problems brought about by the indigenous people have always been the biggest obstacle to the development of the New Territories by the British authorities in Hong Kong. Before the British could make up their minds to solve these problems, Hong Kong had already decided to return to the motherland in '97, and they naturally didn't want to bother with it anymore.

Because of the emergence of Li Xuan and the Oriental Group, Yuen Long became the largest electronics manufacturing center in Hong Kong. With the Oriental Group as the center, a large number of factories in the upstream and downstream industrial chains have flocked to the city, and the industrial land required is far from being able to meet the area of Tin Shui Wai Electronics Park.

However, as long as the factory owners have enough profits, they will naturally cross the sea and show their magical powers. A large amount of agricultural land scattered in the hands of the aborigines of the New Territories has been transformed into new factories after buying and selling and paying back land premiums to the Hong Kong government.

This is a bottom-up industrialization movement, and the Hong Kong-British government will not be able to accelerate the industrial planning layout of the Yuen Long area when a large number of new industrial zones such as Tai Tong Tsuen Industrial Park, Sheung Tsuen Industrial Park, Kam Tin Industrial Park, Pat Heung Industrial Park, and San Tin Industrial Park have emerged in the vicinity of Yuen Long.

In addition to industrial planning, even the small house problem, which had been a headache for the British authorities and the future Hong Kong government, has also emerged with new solutions in the surging economic development of Yuen Long.

When the British occupied the New Territories, in order to gain the support of the local residents, they agreed that the male descendants of the local residents could obtain the right to build houses without paying land premium to the government, commonly known as "small houses".

According to the latest policy implemented by the Hong Kong-British authorities since 1972, each person can apply once in his or her lifetime to build a three-storey (27 ft²/8.23 m high) bungalow with an area of not more than 700 sq ft (about 65 sq m) per floor. In Hong Kong, where the living area is small and the population is large, it is almost the same as a small townhouse.

However, its liquidity is far from being comparable to that of real villas, because according to the regulations, if the small house is sold to a non-indigenous resident, it needs to pay a land premium to the Hong Kong government. The high price of land in Hong Kong is second to none in the world.

Therefore, after the small house makes up the land price, only the real elite and rich can afford it. But how could these people come to the countryside of the New Territories to buy property?

You must know that the small house is only about the same as the small villa in terms of living area, but its infrastructure and surrounding environment are very different. Which rich man would like his neighbors around him to be poor people whose income is only a few tenths or even a few hundredths of their own, and they are not afraid of being robbed in the middle of the night?

And as Yuen Long's economy began to take off, the value of the small house was different. They have become fragrant buns in the eyes of real estate developers, and real estate developers are even willing to bear the difference in land price while exchanging the property rights of a small house with three times the area of the relocation house.

Of course, the only condition for the real estate developers is that the small houses must be transferred in pieces, otherwise the fragmented land cannot be developed and utilized at all! At this time, the unique Township Council and Township Committee-Committee in the New Territories began to play a guiding and coordinating role again.

If you have a small house at home, you can exchange it back to a mansion with the same area as the original residence, and you can also get an additional 7 sets of 600-square-foot junior suites. The family didn't even have to do anything, and they could live a prosperous life just by collecting rent.

As a result, there was a group of newly wealthy people in Yuen Long who made their fortunes by demolition. You must know that in addition to the small houses in their hands, most of these people still retain the farmland that was used for cultivation in the past.

However, as Hong Kong's economy began to take off in the sixties and seventies, the cost of living continued to rise, and agriculture could not maintain a decent life. As a result, a large number of farmers in the New Territories were reduced to low-income classes and forced to work in the cities to support themselves, and the rate of farmland abandonment continued to soar.

Therefore, despite the fact that there is still a lot of agricultural land in the New Territories, more than 95% of Hong Kong's grain, vegetables and poultry meat need to be imported from the mainland or Southeast Asia.

These wastelands, which were once worthless, are now also valuable. Whether it is sold to a real estate developer or developed into an industrial area, a large amount of assets can be exchanged for back.

This is where the magic of rapid urbanisation comes in, with the concentration of factories and population, making Yuen Long the new industrial and economic center of Hong Kong. The huge incremental dividends brought about by economic development are enough to meet the needs of the original residents, real estate developers, factory owners and other forces, so development is the best way to solve the problem.

Hong Kong, on the other hand, has been in a state of slow or even stagnant economic development since 1994. In 1994, the GDP of the Deep Sea Special Zone was only one-twentieth that of Hong Kong. Twenty-five years later, the GDP of the Deep Sea Special Zone has reflexively surpassed that of Hong Kong.

The fundamental reason why Hong Kong's economy will grow sluggishly after '94 is that the economic structure is excessively unbalanced. There is nothing left except the financial industry and the real estate industry. Then the Asian financial crisis completely punctured the real estate bubble that blew up in Hong Kong in the 90s, so the entire Hong Kong economy naturally suffered a heavy blow!

In this life of Hong Kong, although the light industries such as textiles, toys, and clothing have almost moved away, the electronics industry has quickly filled in, and by the way, it has also improved the urban layout of the entire Hong Kong, so that the originally collapsed western and northern regions have quickly narrowed the distance with the core urban area.

Ten to twenty years later, after the electronics industry also moved north due to cost problems, Li Xuan believes that Hong Kong's Internet industry will definitely be able to take over the burden and become the new backbone of Hong Kong's economy.

For example, Quora, a company that became popular all over the world because Li Xuan focused on promoting it at the Global Internet Conference two years ago, has just completed a $40 million round of financing in Series C.

What Li Xuan didn't expect was that this website, which initially took the route of knowledge sharing and was likely to become "Hong Kong Zhihu", has recently begun to invest heavily in the research and development of search technology, and may become "Hong Kong Google" in the future.

Under Li Xuan's influence, Hong Kong is now the global Internet capital. A large number of netizens, especially many highly educated netizens, are likely to become transnational unicorns in the global Internet industry in ten or twenty years.