That's dong guan la. Not shenzhen

I was born in Johor bahru and had the experience of living in Hong Kong for a few months back in 2010. Johor bahru may not become as developed as shenzhen because of below reasons

1. There isn't any big conglomerate in Johor bahru offering big potentials and high quality job opportunities attracting talents when shenzhen has at least tencent. Tencent is basically a home grown company in shenzhen.

2. Singapore isn't just a financial center like Hong Kong and has the potential to become the hub for technology companies like byte dance and baba which recently set up regional headquarter in the city. Shenzhen benefited when Hong Kong decided to focus on the development of property market and financial center status during the handover of hk to china. In a nutshell Singapore is a direct competition to Johor bahru instead of complementing each other.

3. Malaysia has limited population to produce young and hungry entrepreneurs.

But I still love Johor bahru so much I would love retiring in the place. Living cost is relatively low. The city isn't congested and according to world survey it offers one of the highest quality of living amongst asian cities.

Personally I chose Johor bahru for retirement simply because I lived in the city and my parents and big family are all here. We have no plan moving away from here.

It's been ten years since I last came to kl in 2009 so I couldnt do a comparison. But certainly living cost in jb was higher due to proximity to sg. However recently due to border closing with sg, some of those business that mainly target Singapore may suffer and have closed. If covid situations persist, living cost in jb may come down a little bit as these tourist traps wash out

What's the point of building a new city in Malaysia when budgets should be spent in expanding existing cities such as jb and kL? KL s nowhere near as big as Jakarta or bangkok. Integrating jb with Singapore will be a good project to work on but I can't see it happening in the next decade as they couldn't even build a hsr train.