The review, authored by Juanjuan Wan of Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University, uses the DNV and Menon Economics assessment framework as its benchmark. That framework has shifted decisively from hard infrastructure toward institutional quality, scoring cities on dimensions such as maritime finance and law and attractiveness and competitiveness. The 2024 edition placed Singapore first overall, Shanghai fourth and rising, while Hong Kong—which ranked fourth in 2019—had fallen to twelfth. The report cautions that its 2024 methodology changed, so rankings cannot be compared directly with earlier editions. Even so, the pattern is striking: Shenzhen and Guangzhou rank among the world’s leaders in container throughput, with Shenzhen handling 33.39 million TEUs in 2024, yet neither entered the top five in the composite port ranking, which also weighs governance, connectivity and sustainability.

The GBA’s configuration is unique among major bay areas: one country, two systems, three jurisdictions, three separate customs territories and three currencies. The nine Mainland cities operate under China’s socialist legal system, Hong Kong retains its common-law tradition, and Macao preserves a Portuguese-derived civil-law system. Wan is careful to distinguish legal pluralism itself, which is constitutionally established under Article 31 of the Chinese Constitution and the two Basic Laws, from what she calls institutional fragmentation—gaps in choice-of-law rules, cross-boundary enforcement, professional mutual recognition and regulatory standards. Hong Kong’s common-law system, she notes, is among the region’s principal maritime assets. The problem is connectivity, not plurality.

The review identifies a split profile of maritime strengths. Shenzhen and Guangzhou possess world-class port and logistics capacity, while Hong Kong concentrates common-law expertise, international arbitration and maritime finance. In an integrated single-jurisdiction city such as Singapore or Shanghai, these strengths reinforce one another within one institutional environment. In the GBA, their combination depends on rules crossing jurisdictional boundaries. The sub-indicator data make the split vivid: Hong Kong ranks second globally for maritime legal experts and third for the market capitalization of listed maritime companies, while Shenzhen and Guangzhou rank between 27th and 44th on the legal indicators or are not ranked at all. London, by contrast, is first in the world for maritime finance and law, scoring first in five of ten indicators.

Three mechanisms link these connectivity gaps to maritime soft power. The first is uncertainty in the application of law. A single ship-finance or marine-insurance transaction may need to comply simultaneously with three sets of contract rules and registration requirements across the Mainland, Hong Kong and Macao, multiplying compliance costs. Before the recent revision of China’s Maritime Law, rules on ship mortgages were dispersed across three statutes, creating an intricate order of priority. A ship-finance lease might designate Hong Kong law while the mortgaged ship is registered in the Mainland, forcing enforcement to confront differences between Mainland maritime rules and Hong Kong security law. Marine insurance faces similar difficulties: China’s insurance regulator and its judicial authorities have both considered that shipowners’ mutual associations do not constitute commercial insurance activities under the Insurance Law, leaving protection and indemnity contracts regulated only by general contract-law rules.

The second mechanism is regulatory arbitrage and competition in standards. Because the three jurisdictions apply different marine environmental standards, emission limits and enforcement procedures, highly polluting vessels may register and operate where standards are lower, creating a de facto pollution haven. The GBA’s cooperation agreements on environmental protection are administrative instruments without the normative rank of legislation, so rules on information sharing and joint monitoring lack legally binding force. The pressure is visible in the Pearl River Estuary, which crosses all three jurisdictions: Guangdong’s 2024 environment bulletin reports that the proportion of coastal waters with excellent or good water quality fell by 1.7 percentage points year on year, while waters classified worse than Grade IV rose by 2.2 points. Comparative experience from the North Sea shows that ship-source pollution declines only when governance measures are implemented consistently across jurisdictions—precisely what the GBA’s fragmented enforcement landscape makes structurally difficult.

The third mechanism is the cost of judicial coordination. Cross-boundary enforcement of arbitral awards among the Mainland and the two SARs rests on interregional arrangements under the Basic Laws rather than the New York Convention, which applies only to awards made in another State. The 2019 Mainland-Hong Kong judgment arrangement, effective in 2024, is the most significant recent advance, yet its Article 3 excludes judgments on marine pollution, limitation of liability for maritime claims, general average, salvage, maritime liens and passenger carriage. Court judgments in precisely the categories most relevant to Pearl River Estuary environmental disputes therefore still lack a reciprocal enforcement channel. Evidentiary differences compound the costs: Mainland procedure emphasizes a hierarchy of documentary evidence, while Hong Kong’s common-law tradition emphasizes oral testimony and cross-examination, so parties to a cross-border maritime dispute may need to prepare two evidentiary packages for the same facts.

The arbitration caseload data illustrate the concentration of maritime dispute resolution elsewhere. In 2024, an estimated 1,733 new references were made on London Maritime Arbitrators Association terms, with roughly 1,818 new maritime arbitrations seated in London in total. Singapore’s maritime caseload was about nine percent of London’s. The China Maritime Arbitration Commission recorded 239 filings, 79 percent of them maritime, of which 93 were foreign-related, involving parties from forty jurisdictions. The figures are indicative rather than strictly comparable, since the LMAA does not administer arbitrations directly, but the order-of-magnitude difference is clear. Meanwhile China’s maritime courts accepted 6,823 foreign-related cases from 2022 to 2024, and the foreign-related share of CMAC’s caseload rose sharply from about three percent in 2023 to 38.9 percent in 2024—signs of growing demand that the review argues are magnified by enforcement uncertainty in the three-jurisdictional setting.

In response, the review proposes three institutional arrangements. A rule-of-law coordination pilot zone, building on the Qianhai, Nansha and Hengqin cooperation platforms, would extend mutual recognition of contractual choice of law—a step already partly taken by the Qianhai Regulations and a 2025 Supreme People’s Court reply supporting Hong Kong or Macao law choices by SAR-invested enterprises in Shenzhen and Zhuhai. A marine environmental dispute resolution center would use a three-tier jurisdiction defined by arbitrability: commercial disputes such as P&I contract claims would be arbitrable, cleanup-cost claims would proceed through mediation and judicial confirmation, and public-interest litigation would remain with the courts. The review prefers arbitration to a new court for a decisive legal reason: arbitral awards can move among the three jurisdictions under existing interregional arrangements and abroad under the New York Convention, whereas court judgments on marine pollution remain outside the Mainland-Hong Kong arrangement. A cross-border data interoperability mechanism would harmonize the statistical definitions on which international assessments depend, since ship-finance volumes and insurance payout ratios are currently dispersed across incompatible systems.

The review’s most consequential proposal is conceptual: that rule-of-law coordination—the efficiency of cross-jurisdictional legal alignment, encompassing mutual recognition of rules, convergence of enforcement standards and the speed of coordinated dispute resolution—should become a regional indicator in international maritime-city assessments. All five existing dimensions use a single jurisdiction as the analytical unit, so they cannot capture this variable. Functional comparisons with the Rhine-Scheldt basin, where the 1815 Central Commission for Navigation of the Rhine unified technical shipping standards, and with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, whose bi-state governance has not prevented courts from applying different state-law tests, show that the problem is structural, not unique to the GBA. Even the Scheldt Estuary, with two centuries of bilateral treaties, has seen courts repeatedly suspend Antwerp’s port expansion over divergent applications of EU environmental directives. Wan is explicit about the limits of her analysis: it identifies mechanisms consistent with observed ranking patterns rather than estimating causal effects, and rankings are also shaped by the pandemic, geopolitics and methodology changes. But if the GBA can make an early breakthrough in cross-jurisdictional rule-of-law coordination, its experience could provide an operational framework for every multi-jurisdictional port region in the world seeking to convert institutional diversity into competitive advantage.

Subject of Research: Marine Affairs and Policy

Article Title: Institutional fragmentation and rule-of-law coordination in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area: a maritime soft power perspective

Article References: Wan, J. (2026). Institutional fragmentation and rule-of-law coordination in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area: a maritime soft power perspective. Frontiers in Marine Science, 13, Article 1977131. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2026.1977131

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2026.1977131

Keywords: maritime soft power, Greater Bay Area, rule of law, maritime arbitration, port governance, institutional fragmentation, Institutional, fragmentation, rule-of-law, coordination, Guangdong-Hong, Kong-Macao