There is a saying in Guangdong Province that the two most painful experiences are living on Hengqin island and dying on Mangzhou island.

The former was notorious for its extreme poverty while the latter, now part of Taishan city in Guangdong, was a wartime execution ground in the 1930s.

Although part of Zhuhai, one of China's first special economic zones (SEZs) and now a prosperous city, Hengqin was not part of the original zone and remains relatively unchanged since the early 1980s.

However, there is now a growing sense of optimism and, as the country marks the 30th anniversary of its groundbreaking SEZs on Thursday, the island is set to join the party.

Following last year's decision to redraw the Zhuhai zone boundary to include Hengqin, soon to boast a new campus of the University of Macao, residents have been eagerly building houses to rent out to the army of migrant workers who will inevitably arrive to work on the infrastructure and development projects.

Hengqin is the largest of Zhuhai's 146 islands but for decades residents relied largely on Macao, just a 10-minute boat ride away.

"Most of the time we rowed boats to Macao, taking fish, fruit and firewood and bringing back rice, oil and clothes," said 80-year-old Lin Beitian, who moved to the island with his mother and three siblings in 1936.

"We were so poor at the time," he said, explaining that about 500 of Hengqin's 3,000 inhabitants fled to Macao illegally when access was blocked during the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976). "Most people didn't think they could survive."

Since 1980, Zhuhai has seen its population surge from 120,000 to 1.45 million. GDP has also increased by an average of 20 percent year-on-year, hitting 103 billion yuan (US$15 billion) last year.

Yet, although per capita GDP in Zhuhai has jumped to more than 69,000 yuan a year, in Hengqin it is still barely 9,000 yuan.

A 1,425-meter bridge, the sole link from the island to Zhuhai's modern downtown, was not completed until 1999, and the No 14 bus is the only form of public transport.

No courier companies deliver to the area and even the Agricultural Bank of China, the only one on the island before 2010, closed its branch years ago.

The lack of progress has been a source of frustration for residents. Although forests, wetlands and rare mangroves dominate more than half of the 106-sq-km island, for some the natural beauty cannot compare with the gleaming Hotel Lisboa or the futuristic 338-meter-tall Macao Tower, both of which can be easily seen across the water in Macao.

Lin said his two daughters, who were born in Macao because there was no hospital on Hengqin at the time, moved their families to Macao permanently in the 1980s.

"They invite me to have dinner but they seldom come back here," said the pensioner. "Even if they do, they never stay overnight. They don't like it here."

However, life in Hengqin has begun to change since August last year, when central authorities approved plans to make the island China's third State-level strategic new area, putting it alongside Shanghai's Pudong district and Binhai in Tianjin.

"Macao was just like here in the late 1970s," said islander Xu Jianxin, 42. "Macao changed but Hengqin stayed the same. Now it's finally our turn."