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The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) releases the results of a research project “Inter-city Competition and Cooperation between Hong Kong and Shenzhen in the 11th Five-year Plan Period” today. The project has initiated a 2008 public opinion survey among the people in Hong Kong on the cooperation of Hong Kong-Shenzhen airports (see full report at http://ihome.cuhk.edu.hk/~b890706/hs.html). It is funded by the Public Policy Research Grant, Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, and of which Professor Jianfa Shen of the Department of Geography and Resource Management at CUHK is the principal investigator. The survey was conducted from 13 to 15 March 2008 via the Telephone Survey Research Lab of Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies at CUHK. The survey covered a random sample of 514 respondents aged 18 or above in Hong Kong with response rate of 51.8%. At 95% confidence level, the maximum error in percentages by inference is positive or negative 4.32%. The major results are as follows.

(1) Regarding the use of the two airports, 65.5% of the respondents only use Hong Kong airport for travels, 15.4% also use Shenzhen airport. The respondents who use Hong Kong airport frequently account for 16%, about 10% higher than those who use Shenzhen airport frequently (6.5%). It is clear that Hong Kong residents prefer to use Hong Kong airport while Shenzhen airport is also a major option for them.

(2) Managers, administrators and mainland-born residents are more likely to use Shenzhen airport.

(3) 70.3% and 28.2% of the respondents choose Hong Kong airport due to Hong Kong airport’s accessibility and more international flight routes and frequency respectively. For those choosing Shenzhen airport, 57.7% and 37.2% indicate that the main considerations are lower airfare/tax and more domestic flight routes and frequency respectively.

(4) 96% of the respondents think that maintaining the leading role of Hong Kong airport in passenger and cargo transportation is important for the Hong Kong economy, and these respondents are positive in the cooperation of two airports. 72.6% of the respondents accept using Shenzhen airport to go to mainland cities and 59.8% accept using Shenzhen airport to go to overseas cities.

(5) About 60% of the respondents indicate that it is inconvenient for them to use Shenzhen airport because of inaccessibility (34.6%), time consuming of ground transport (23.1%), boundary crossing (11.5%) and difficulties in buying air tickets (6.4%).

(6) Regarding policies or potential policies for the cooperation of the two airports, a majority of the respondents support three policies/potential policies – improving ground transportation, building a railway to link the two airports and establishing a joint corporation for the two airports.

(7) Over half of the respondents are satisfied with Hong Kong government’s performance in the airport cooperation of the two cities. At the same time, 65.3% believe that market should play a leading role in the airport cooperation, with less government intervention.