South China's Hengqin Port emerges as busiest Greater Bay Area gateway

The Hengqin Port in Zhuhai City, south China's Guangdong Province, had handled more than 100 million cross-border passenger trips since it was put into operation in August 2020, with the milestone reached by Friday afternoon, according to the Zhuhai General Station of Immigration Inspection.

The port had also processed 11.7 million inbound and outbound vehicle trips in less than six years, underscoring its emergence as one of the busiest hubs in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area city cluster in south China.

Located at the southern tip of Zhuhai and separated from Macao by a narrow stretch of water, Hengqin has become a core center for personnel exchanges, economic and trade cooperation, and livelihood integration between Guangdong and the neighboring Macao, as well as a vital gateway for the Guangdong-Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone.

With increasingly convenient customs clearance procedures, more Macao residents are choosing to live, work and start up businesses in Hengqin, leading to a steady increase in cross-border travel.

Immigration procedures for both Zhuhai and Macao now require only a single facial recognition and fingerprint verification, cutting average clearance time to under 20 seconds.

"[The customs clearance] is incredibly fast. From queuing [at the checkpoints] to finishing [the exit-entry procedure], it feels like just ten seconds. For those of us running cross-border businesses, time means efficiency, and the changes at this port have really saved us a lot of time," said a Macao resident surnamed Lyu.

The streamlined clearance has boosted flows of people, goods, capital and information. Daily cross-border passenger trips have risen from some 20,000 at the beginning to around 100,000 today, with annual growth in passenger flow exceeding 40 percent.

"In the first quarter of this year, the Hengqin Port processed more than 9.22 million cross-border passenger trips and over 1.08 million vehicle crossings, up 31.7 percent and 46.5 percent year on year, respectively. Both passenger and motor vehicle flows continue to grow with strong momentum," said Zhang Xin, deputy head of the Border Inspection Division at the Hengqin Port.

South China's Hengqin Port emerges as busiest Greater Bay Area gateway

The swelling Euphrates River has submerged farmland and washed away roads and bridges in Syrian provinces of Deir al-Zour and Raqqa since late May.

The Syrian transitional government has ordered residents along the riverbanks to evacuate as the flood water continues to rise and has inundated villages in the region.

"No one has come to help us. The entire area is submerged. The water level has risen as high as the houses and is still rising. All people are in a hurry to find a shelter. We have nowhere to go," said a local resident.

The flood has caused the Euphrates' water surface to expand to three times its normal extent, from 60.9 square kilometers to 188.7 square kilometers.

The disaster stems from abnormal torrential rain in upstream regions coupled with large-scale water releases from dams, according to Syrian news media reports.

Citing regional water authority sources, Turkish media reported that months of high precipitation raised water levels at Turkey's Ataturk Dam, prompting authorities to carry out "controlled water releases," with the spillway gates opened for the first time in seven years.

Euphrates floods hit northeastern Syria