Chinese planners look to mega-cities
© 2001 Reuters
March 14, 2001
Story by Sarah Cheung
BEIJING - Chinese planners are dreaming about cities - mega-cities.
Cities with populations the size of whole countries, big enough to swallow up a Canada of 30 million people with ease, or squeeze in a South Korea of 46 million.A network of cities rising from coastal plains and river deltas that will help absorb, eventually, a population greater than the 281 million of modern-day America.
These urban behemoths are not fantasy. Housing will be needed to cater for a population expected to grow a net 10 million a year for the next decade and increase to 1.6 billion by 2050 from 1.25 billion now.
Each year for the next 20 years China will need to find work for 12 million jobless peasants, according to some Chinese studies. And the cheapest and most efficient way to do this is to expand existing cities, and build huge new ones.
"It's the most economic way to create infrastructure, housing, jobs and pollution control," said Andy Xie, chief economist at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in Hong Kong.
"With these large cities, things that weren't possible before are now economically viable."
The population pressure has reached bursting point. China has four times as many people as the United States but only half the habitable land.
Rural incomes are falling. Riots by angry farmers are commonplace. And an estimated 200 million peasants are on the move, surplus rural labourers prowling through cities in search of jobs on construction sites and in factories.
ENVIRONMENT A WINNER
Urbanisation has become a priority for Chinese leaders haunted by visions of mass rural unrest.
At a meeting of the annual session of parliament last week, Premier Zhu Rongji called for city construction to "increase job opportunities and sources of income for farmers".
Dai Junliang, an official in the Ministry of Civil Affairs, predicts that 40 new cities will spring up each year for the next 20 years until there are 750 million people living in urban areas.
Official figures put China's current urban population at around 390 million, but experts say the figure is closer to 455 million.
For Xie, the bigger the better when it comes to cities.
Massive economies of scale, he argues, will allow China to build state-of-the-art infrastructure it might not otherwise be able to afford.
"Telecommunications are going to reach levels never seen before, there will be super-modern transport systems," he said.
All this construction and urban job-creation will underpin China's economic growth for decades to come.
Another big winner will be the environment.
"Scattered rural industries are heavy polluters," said Songsu Choi, principal urban economist with the World Bank based in Washington.
A NATION OF MEGALOPOLIS
Zhou Yixing, a geography professor at Peking University, envisages "metropolitan interlocking areas", or huge "megalopolis" that devour cities and towns across a vast area.
One would be based on the northern cities of Beijing and Tianjin, each with a population of more than 10 million and lying about 110 km (70 miles) apart.
"Beijing lacks abundant arable land and it lacks a port, but Tianjin has both," said Zhou.
"Linking with Tianjin will make Beijing stronger."
Shanghai would form the biggest megalopolis in terms of area and population, Zhou predicted, stretching around the mouth of the Yangtze river.
The Pearl River Delta region, covering the southern cities of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Zhuhai would be a natural third megalopolis.
Last to develop would be a northeastern urban sprawl stretching from Dalian to Shenyang in Liaoning province, Zhou said.
And although the government wants to develop the poverty-stricken interior as part of a so-called "Great Western Development" plan, geographers and economists agree it is never likely to catch up with the rich coast.
"The West does not have good links and they lack ports," said Zhou. "All the big urban centres will be on the coast."
Xie agrees, adding that migration from the West to the coastal areas will become a problem.
"If anything, the population over there is going to decline, because we have seen migration outside of these areas already," he said.