Only in China…
BY MARCUS ROBERTS
Sometimes the sheer power of the state in China surprises and overwhelms. You read of some initiative that the state is proposing and your mind can’t grasp it – its scale, its enormousness and, unfortunately all too frequently, its enormity. One example of this was recently discussed in the Australian Business Insider. Over the next five years, the Chinese Government is hoping to move 100 million people from the countryside into urban areas. That’s right: by 2020 China is looking to urbanise the equivalent of the population of the Philippines!
The plan is to rapidly increase China’s urbanisation rate (currently at something less than 60% of its population) so that domestic demand for Chinese products is increased. This will allow China to rely less on exports for its economic growth. Moving farmers into urban environments will hopefully allow the country to become the visible economic global powerhouse. This will necessarily involve massive infrastructure projects and residential building.
Of course when you are trying to urbanise so many people so quickly, things do not always run smoothly .....
Sometimes the sheer power of the state in China surprises and overwhelms. You read of some initiative that the state is proposing and your mind can’t grasp it – its scale, its enormousness and, unfortunately all too frequently, its enormity. One example of this was recently discussed in the Australian Business Insider. Over the next five years, the Chinese Government is hoping to move 100 million people from the countryside into urban areas. That’s right: by 2020 China is looking to urbanise the equivalent of the population of the Philippines!
“The plan was first unveiled in March of last year as the “National New-type Urbanisation Plan (2014-2020).”At 30 chapters long, the plan is a staggeringly complex vision involving the mass uprooting of Chinese citizens and the destruction, and reconstruction, of homes, office buildings, and infrastructure. It imagines a China that can compete with the world leaders, both financially and ecologically.”
The plan is to rapidly increase China’s urbanisation rate (currently at something less than 60% of its population) so that domestic demand for Chinese products is increased. This will allow China to rely less on exports for its economic growth. Moving farmers into urban environments will hopefully allow the country to become the visible economic global powerhouse. This will necessarily involve massive infrastructure projects and residential building.
“The 2020 plan calls for major extensions to railways and expressways so that all cities with more than 200,000 people are connected. High-speed rail will join cities with at least 500,000 people …Since 100 hundred million people need a place to go, the country’s plan has been to merge major cities with large suburbs to create so-called megacities. Formally, megacities have populations greater than 10 million. Several are already underway, including China’s Pearl River Delta to the south and Jing-Jin-Ji, which surrounds Beijing, to the north.”
Of course when you are trying to urbanise so many people so quickly, things do not always run smoothly .....
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