Shenzhen airport: Flight or fancy?

Incendiary British rag the Daily Mail and its national rival the Independent set their sights on Shenzhen’s terminal 3 just a few days after the much-vaunted architectural manta ray officially opened on November 28.

Comparing Shenzhen’s T3 to Heathrow’s T5, travel writer Simon Caldwell conceded in the Independent that T3 incurred “just one-seventh the cost of T5” and that the latter “had been 20 years in the making (while) the bigger Terminal 3 at Shenzhen took only five." Nevertheless, he went on to describe T3 as a potential "white elephant” based on the current lack of international flights, the global stature of neighboring Hong Kong, and the observation that Hong Kong and Macao currently offer visa-free stopovers, unlike Shenzhen. He cites Regent Travel owner Neil Tailor who believes that “Shenzhen had its appeal as a small village when China first opened up in the late 1970s, but tour operators will find it hard to promote now.”

Though the Independent references the impressive eco-tech and innovative design that make Shenzhen T3 a forward-looking vision, the article fails to analyze any wider perspective. First, T3 has only just opened and operators are understandably cautious because Shenzhen is young and still finding its footing; on the other hand, it has still managed to emerge as one of China’s richest cities in just 30 years. Second, reporting about the city to a sizable percentage of the British public via two leading media outlets suggests that Shenzhen is in fact firmly on the global map, compared with the late 1970s, as mentioned by Neil Tailor, when talk of the city would have no doubt garnered a bemused “What, where?" from the global public.

More importantly, T3 is a long-term project over three phases that will be completed in 2035. By then technological rampancy is likely to have rendered a considerably different world and, in that context, Shenzhen’s stature, visa-stopover status and future global position are hardly ready for implied definitive standpoints in 2013.

An effective piece of future-proof eco-infrastructure completed as quickly and cheaply as it was suggests a project that’s not thinking of being a transient trophy for China; it’s thinking of a long-term process that anticipates Shenzhen's increased global presence. Or should the city just give up, devolve into a backwater and ask Hong Kong to lead on?