# Half of China's Population to be Urban by 2010



## hkskyline

Kenwen said:


> Just because one architect said something doesnt mean anything, and China is obviously the paradise for any architects, because they can design what ever they want. About the housing issue, most immigrants are factory workers, every factories in China provide housing for the workers, and there are always cheap place for them to rent like those old apartment, thats why we never see santy towns or slums in china, so there must be solution to them, if some of u think they cant find any where to live, find me some source and photos


I'd look at the concepts and the points the article illustrates for validity, because an idea supported by millions may not be correct either, while one opinion may actually be factually sound and logical.


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## hkskyline

*UN report: Half of China's people will live in cities in less than a decade *
27 June 2007

BEIJING (AP) - Zhang Bing grew up in remote Inner Mongolia, where his family herded sheep and raised chickens. Today he manages a glittering karaoke club 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) away in a booming eastern Chinese city. 

Zhang, 26, is part of a huge wave of rural workers streaming into China's cities to seek opportunity. 

A U.N. report released Wednesday said more than half of China's population -- now 1.3 billion -- will be living in urban areas in 10 years. 

Officials say an estimated 150 million people moved to China's cities between 1999 and 2005, their labor fueling the country's breakneck economic growth. 

"From 1980 to 2030, the population of China will go from being 20 percent urban to almost two-thirds urban," said William Ryan, the U.N. Population Fund's information adviser for Asia and the Pacific region. 

The agency's State of World Population 2007 report says more than half the world's population will live in cities and towns in 2008, and 60 percent, or 5 billion people, by 2030. 

Zhang earns about US$500 (euro370) a month at the Oriental Pearl karaoke club. 

He saves two-thirds, and is thinking of opening a store to sell knockoff purses. 

He said he expects to have a wife, house and car -- "an Audi, definitely" -- within 10 years. 

Unlike many migrants, Zhang went to business school. His monthly salary is much higher than the average worker's 500 to 800 yuan (US$65 to $105; euro48 to euro78), according to Duan Chengrong, a demographics professor at Renmin University. 

Migrant workers are often crammed into rented housing, with an average of five square meters (50 square feet) of space per person and no heat, running water or sanitation facilities, Duan said. 

Workers at many construction sites lodge in ramshackle dormitories or tents pitched on a sidewalk. 

The government is trying to "avoid the emergence of urban slums and the transformation of rural poor to urban poor," said Hou Yan, deputy director of the social development department in China's Development and Reform Commission. 

China's urbanization is unique in that it stems largely from migration instead of natural population growth. 

The Communist government that took control in 1949 imposed strict controls on where people could live and work. Only in recent years, rising wealth and greater personal freedoms allowed rural dwellers to move to cities. 

Zhang believes cities are the China's future. 

Before taking the job at the karaoke club, he taught Chinese to foreign students, sold phone cards and ran a copy shop. 

"In order to get employed, what is most important is to be diligent," he said. "Only when you work hard can you get good results."


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## [email protected]

How about the Chinese sex ratio? 

The normal ratio
Man 103： woman 100 

Young Chinese sex ratio. (Less than 35 years old.) 
Man 130 ： Woman 100 

The sex ratio seems to spread in India.


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## PresidentBjork

I really don't think that authoritarianism, like in all other things, is going to help the environment. hno: 

It easy simply to focus on CO2 emissions only, but conventional pollution is also having a huge impact on China. 

China is now suffering from some of the worst ecological damage in the world, with soil erosion, polluted lakes, rivers and wetlands, most of the world's most polluted cities and sewerage contamination.

Its all very well for the government to unveil grand schemes to build parks and eco-cities to show off to the outside world, but in comparison to damaging developments they are a drop in the ocean. Sure, new laws are being passed by China's State Environmental Protection Administration to criticise developments that break laws, but the only problem is, - they have no way of enforcing them. The developments can continue on regardless, usually able to rely on the support of some corrupt official.

Only recently the world bank calculated that the price of pollution on health in China alone last year was $170 billion. Combined with agricultural damage the effect is enormous. Unfortunately up to now the Chinese government has chosen to stick to good old fashion denial in these matters, and doesn't look likely to change. 

Yep, this industrial revolution has happened before, and why shouldn't the Chinese enjoy the benefits of it? Well there's no reason why they shouldn't, but lets remember this is over a sixth of the world's population we're dealing with here, the effects are going to be tenfold over anything before if the same old mistakes are going be made.


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## FM 2258

[email protected] said:


> How about the Chinese sex ratio?
> 
> The normal ratio
> Man 103： woman 100
> 
> Young Chinese sex ratio. (Less than 35 years old.)
> Man 130 ： Woman 100
> 
> The sex ratio seems to spread in India.


That sucks for China. I think a society is better off when there are much more women than men.


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## LMCA1990

That worries me. Those cities are going to be overcrowded. We'll probably see many awesome skyscrapers pop up though.


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## hkskyline

The biggest fuel for this urban migration is from the uneducated peasant masses. They're not going to enjoy the skyscraper and economic boom that their hard labour is contributing to.


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## skyscraper_1

^ But hopefully there children will.


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## hkskyline

*China rural cops to bust migrant crime in cities *

BEIJING, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Chinese cities are drafting in rural police to tackle crime as millions of under-employed rural workers seeking better prospects migrate to urban areas. 

The China Daily reported on Tuesday that the police ministry would also establish a database to keep tabs on the country's massive pool of "temporary" resident workers in cities by 2009. 

China's economic boom has largely been driven by the surplus of cheap labour flooding into cities to work on construction sites and infrastructure projects, but their presence has also stoked fears of rising crime and an emerging urban underclass. 

"Although migrant workers are an irreplaceable force in the country's modernisation, they have also caused public security problems," the China Daily said, citing police figures that said they accounted for 41 percent of people detained in criminal cases last year. 

Liu Jinguo, a vice minister of the ministry of public security, said police from rural areas would be posted in city police stations "in regions where floating population crime is pronounced", the Beijing News reported. 

China dubs its 150 million surplus rural workers migrating across the country to find work the "floating population". 

Its treatment of migrant workers has come under international scrutiny after rights groups accused Beijing of clearing neighbourhoods and forced evictions as part of urban renewal for the 2008 Olympics. 

Rights groups regularly accuse China of not doing enough to protect migrant workers, whose status as rural residents often denies them basic benefits such as health care and education in their adopted cities. 

But Beijing says the problem is complex and says controls on population growth are needed to ease strained infrastructure and guarantee water supplies in many cities. 

The rural police scheme has been piloted in a city in the eastern province of Jiangsu and will be rolled out to major cities with major migrant worker populations, the Beijing News said. 

Chinese police often travel long distances to handle crimes by home-town offenders, not least to drag off some of the thousands of protesters that make their way to Beijing each year to petition the central government after failing to get redress at local levels.


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## hkskyline

*China's Urban Population Reaches 577 MLN In 2006 *

BEIJING, Sept 19 Asia Pulse - China's urbanization rate reached 43.9 per cent in 2006, with the urban population hitting 577 million, according to statistics provided by the Ministry of Construction.

With the rapid development of the economy, China's urbanization level has risen sharply, with about 15 million rural residents entering cities and towns. Urbanization has entered a rapid development phase in the country.

The population in China's 40 large cities including Beijing and Shanghai makes up 36.2 per cent of the country's total urban population, and three major coastal city clusters accommodate about 60 per cent of urbanized people.


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## Red flag's egg

near 100m rural ppl will flows to cities , that would be good for economy, more labour , more production, more consumption ,more houses needed, more transportation facilities.. just be optimistic , there won't be a serious food shortage.but it indeed would cause a lot of problems...i suppose to build more litte town or midsized cities is a better choice


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## Sen

Magic Night said:


> I doubt peasants can find jobs that provide dorms for them.


actually many companies do provide dorms for peasants, it counts toward their compensation. The condition is not great but they do have a place to live.

Other than that renting with 6 other people in a 3 bedroom apartment for example is also an option, this is illegal but it is widely practiced.

Not all migrants are uneducated/unskilled, at least in Beijing I have noticed that a significant number of them are well to do and are doing the same jobs that used to be taken by native Beijingers, it is quite common to see migrants now days you don't really think they are different.

Not to mention their children will integrate very fast into the local society.


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## hkskyline

The problem is with the masses of uneducated peasants who cannot be easily absorbed by urban projects, especially since the central government is trying to curb the infrastructure boom amidst rising fears of a bubble in asset prices.


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## hkskyline

*Analysis - China's Solutions To Shrinking Farmland *

BEIJING, Oct 5 Asia Pulse - As urbanization and new factories devour more and more rural land over the last few years, presenting a threat to the country's food safety, the Chinese government is casting worried glances at the nation's shrinking farmland.

China, which supports 22 per cent of the world's total population with just 10 per cent of the world's total farmland, must focus its land use policy on curbing the expropriation of land for construction projects and on using existing farmland in a more efficient manner, said Wang Xiaoguang, a senior economist with the National Development and Reform Commission. 

With the population expected to reach 1.4 billion in three years from now, the government determined in 2006 that the absolute bottom line for arable land was 120 million hectares if it was to be able to grow enough grain to feed everyone in the country.

One way to curb the problem is to persuade farmers to use land more efficiently and to start living "up" rather than "out", Wang said.

Ma Youming moved into a new flat with his wife and son six months ago. He said, "I'm not a farmer any more, now I work for a company. Most of my fellow villagers have started up small businesses or are hiring themselves out as day laborers."

The 42-year-old Ma said his village Xinchang in Taizhou of eastern China's Zhejiang Province, had 875 people in 250 families, who had lived in an untidy, poorly planned environment for years.

But the villagers realized that the village did not have enough land for them to build new homes after they became richer.

So they invited professionals from Zhejiang University, in the provincial capital of Hangzhou, to help them. In 2003, the professionals drew up a new plan for the village with land set aside for public wonders: apartments for the former farmers rather than houses on a section of land.

Village head Yu Zheng said that by going up in the air they have increased per-capita living space from 37 to 82 square metres. And "we have land left for commercial development. We've built shops with a combined floor space of 2,500 square meters, and are preparing to build a 19-storey building to rent out."

Last year, the village business garnered 1.5 million yuan (US$200 million) in annual income, and the figure is likely to reach 2.5 million yuan this year, Yu said.

Ma Youming is satisfied with his new home. "We don't need to worry about the property management of our apartment building for it is paid for by the village business. And we don't have to pay to give our neighborhood a green look either."

Yu said scientific planning and the efficient use of limited land resources have transformed people's lives.

A report from Zhejiang Research Institute of Development and Reform says rural houses in the province use land too capriciously. If the land for housing is used more efficiently and scientifically, at least 100,000 hectares of land can be reclaimed for farming, equivalent to 5.7 times the land devoted to construction projects last year in the whole province.

The campaign "Trade your rural house for an apartment," being rolled out in economically-developed coastal regions, could save 40 per cent of land used for home construction, mitigating the threat to farmland and triggering consumer demands among former farmers.

However, experts say that "apartments for farmers" work best in coastal regions and suburbs of large and mid-sized cities where manufacturing and service industries flourish. Many years will pass before they are adopted in underdeveloped western regions.

Authorities in neighboring Fujian Province took the theme of this year's national land day on June 25 - "efficient use of land and preserving farmland" - to heart. They compiled rural housing charts, settling on 15 approved architectural housing styles that suit the climatic, geological and economic conditions in southern regions, as well as the living habits of coastal and mountainous areas in the province.

They distributed the charts to 100,000 rural households in the province and have helped 37,000 households build cost-effective homes in a land-efficient manner.

Land efficiency does not stop with humans. New-style livestock pens have also been built to save land.

The Xinling Farming and Animal Husbandry Co. in Jinjiang of Fujian has built three five-story buildings for pig raising, each for 2,000 pigs. After sows become pregnant on the fifth floor, they descend by lift to the fourth floor to give birth. Piglets are nurtured on the same floor, and after they "grow up", they take the lift down to the other three stories to be raised there.

Efficient use of land is one barrel in the government shotgun, and the other involves tightening controls over shady land deals to prevent further encroachments on farmland.

Efforts to save land have begun to pay off. According to the Ministry of Land and Resources, China had 122 million hectares of farmland in 2006, down 307,000 hectares or 0.25 per cent from the 2005 level. But 367,000 hectares had been converted back into farmland, 42 per cent more than the total area of land expropriated for construction purposes last year.

China's population of 1.3 billion demand approximately 500 million tons of grain annually, or more than 300 kilograms per capita. Last year the nation's grain production was 490 billion tons or so. In other words, the 122 million hectares of farmland provide just enough to feed the 1.3 billion people.

"Grain production needs to increase in line with the growth in population. China cannot afford any further shrinkage in farmland," said Chen Qizhou, head of a research centre under the Ministry of Land Resources. Chen pointed out that China's population would grow to 1.4 billion by 2010. The figure of 120 million hectares of farmland is a minimum that cannot be squeezed.

To improve land management, China has launched a second national land survey due to be completed in 2009. It has also passed the property law, which enshrines special protection for farmland and strictly restricts the expropriation of farmland for construction purposes.

Construction of villas, golf courses and training centers for governmental institutions and state-owned companies has been at least temporarily banned.

In April, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Land and Resources and the Ministry of Construction made a joint announcement on development-zone projects. They said the number of development zones in China had decreased from 6,866 to 1,568 and new provincial-level development zones would not be approved. The move targets poor use of land by unqualified development zones.

In the meantime, China is putting together a nationwide land supervision regime and has set up nine regional bureaus.

According to the Ministry of Land and Resources, less land was approved for construction projects last year. Yet, the ministry admitted that 131,077 land-for-construction project cases were detected nationwide in the same year, up 17.3 per cent on the previous year. They involved nearly 100,000 hectares of land, up 76.7 per cent, including 43,000 hectares of farmland.

Observers noted that although land control policies are well established in China, local governments' obsession with gross domestic product (GDP) growth, poor policy implementation and low penalties for rural violations have conspired to increase the number of infringements.

Zou Yuchuan, a national political consultant, noted that land use and land protection do not figure in the performance assessment system for local officials, who are eager to make "achievements" in their political careers.

Experts suggested that the current land law should be amended to curb local governments' power to approve land use projects and to institute an effective accountability system. Also, they said that a mechanism should be created to encourage the efficient use of land.


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## hkskyline

*China's rural population shrinks to 737 million as farmers stream to cities for work *
22 October 2007

BEIJING (AP) - China's rural population continued to shrink as farmers stream to booming cities, though a majority of people still lived in the countryside, state media reported. 

Millions have moved to China's cities in the last few years, providing labor to fuel the country's breakneck economic growth. A U.N. report released in June estimated that more than half of China's population will be living in urban areas within 10 years. 

About 737 million people, or 56 percent of the total population of 1.3 billion, lived in rural areas at the end of 2006, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Monday, citing National Bureau of Statistics Director Xie Fuzhan. 

The rural population had declined from 64 percent of the total in 2001 and 74 percent in 1990, Xinhua said. 

China's urbanization is unique in that it stems largely from migration instead of natural population growth. 

The Communist government that took control in 1949 imposed residency rules as part of strict controls on where people could live, work or even whom they could marry. It was not until recent years that rising wealth and greater personal freedoms eroded the system, allowing farmers to move to cities. 

The United Nations Population Fund has estimated that, in less than a decade, China will have 83 cities of more than 750,000 people.


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## hkskyline

*Cities continue to lure rural poor *
24 October 2007
South China Morning Post

The creep of urbanisation is continuing, with just 56 per cent of the mainland's population living in rural areas by the end of last year, according to National Bureau of Statistics director Xie Fuzhan . 

Xinhua quoted Mr Xie as saying the rural population was 737 million and urban residents numbered 577 million by the end of last year. 

Just over 18 months ago, the government estimated there were 940 million rural dwellers. However, a bureau spokesman said it considered migrant workers in cities for more than six months urban residents. 

Lu Jiehua, from Peking University's Population Research Institute, said previous estimates of the mainland's rural population - 64 per cent in 2001 and 74 per cent in 1990 - included migrant workers, who might have spent more time toiling in city factories than on their farmland. 

Though it would be hard to use the data to determine specific urbanisation trends over the years, Professor Lu said farmers had been flocking to cities faster than in previous years, and especially since the 11th five-year plan came into effect last year. 

"The economy has boomed over the past few years and this has lured more and more farmers into the cities," he said. "This shows that there is still a labour surplus in rural China." 

Managers of factories, especially in thriving southern provinces, have complained of problems recruiting and retaining workers over the past few years, prompting concerns about a labour shortage that could hamper economic growth. The government denies a shortage is imminent and says the problem is more about a lack of skilled workers. 

According to official figures, there were 120 million migrant workers by 2000 and 147 million by 2005. 

Despite their inclusion in urban population figures, migrant workers often fall through the social security net that protects urban counterparts because their residence permits are registered in the countryside. 

Earlier this year, Li Zhou, a rural development expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the urban-rural gap was expected to expand this year to 3.3 to one from last year's ratio of 3.28 to one and the 3.22 to one seen in 2005. 

Last year, farmers' average annual income rose 7.4 per cent to 3,587 yuan, but the average urban resident earned more than 10,000 yuan. 

In his report last week to the 17th National Congress, President Hu Jintao pledged to strengthen income redistribution.


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## isaidso

The numbers are very sobering. China is already home to so many massive cities, yet there are still 737 million people in rural China? If China urbanizes to the levels seen in some Western nations, that could translate into another 50 cities the size of Chicago or Hong Kong!


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## hkskyline

I doubt the cities can accept the deluge of poor, uneducated rural migrants. The key is to keep them out, or entice them to stay where they are. China needs a lot of farmers to feed the country.


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## isaidso

The only thing that will keep rural Chinese from coming to the cities is to drastically improve quality of life, financial rewards, and opportunities in rural China.


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## hkskyline

*Richer India, China must invest in farms - report *

NEW DELHI, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Rapidly expanding India and China need to invest heavily to improve farm productivity as both face a number of food challenges due to rising affluence, a report said on Monday. 

The JPMorgan Hands-on China Series report says both countries face supply and demand issues that put them at risk of food price volatility. 

"Food inflation has accelerated in recent years, as a result of growing demand for grain -- which is compounded by periodic supply shocks due to natural disaster and planning problems," according to the report. 

"Both countries will need to invest heavily to improve agricultural productivity." 

China's annual growth eased slightly in the third quarter to 11.5 percent and annual consumer price inflation in September slowed to 6.2 percent, not far from a decade high of 6.5 percent in August, official figures showed. 

The Indian economy has grown at an average 8.6 percent in the past four years and annual inflation hit a two-year high at 6.69 percent in January. 

But since then India's inflation has eased to a five-year low of 3.07 percent but pressure on food prices remains. 

The JPMorgan report says there has been a shift in diet from starchy foods to animal-based protein as people have become richer in both China and India. 

China's urban population -- which is growing by some 15 to 20 million people a year -- consumes three times more meat than the rural population, raising demand for commodities such as soy and corn, it said. 

"The same dynamic is taking place in India -- there has been a substantial growth in the consumption of dairy products, eggs and poultry -- but this is somewhat less pronounced," the report said. 

It says soaring demand for agricultural commodities from China and India will make both countries prominent players in the global commodities markets. 

"If India improved its agricultural productivity, it might find China could prove to be one of its largest customers," the report said. 

Farm growth has averaged just 2 percent over the past five years in India, far short of services and manufacturing, which averaged over 8 percent. 

The sector has not kept pace with the economic rise of India as government reforms that started in the 1990s focused on the development of manufacturing and services.


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## isaidso

philadweller said:


> China is heading towards an ecological disaster. Why so much growth?


They're only replicating what we in the west have done. You could just as easily have asked that question of ourselves.



philadweller said:


> Yes but China is destroying the ecosystem faster than most countries.


Nope, if you bothered looking up the relevant data, Chinese per capita pollution emissions are still far lower than here in the west. We're the world's biggest destroyers of the ecosystem. China is simply the fastest growing because they're catching up to us in the level of destruction.


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## the spliff fairy

Per capita China is less than half what it is for the EU, whilst the US is a whopping 5.5 x what it is in China.

Tonnes per person 

3.64 China & Taiwan

8.002 EU

20.165 USA

Who the hell are we to point the finger??


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## philadweller

Wow forgive my ignorance. I heard that China has 100 cities with a population of 1,000,000 or more. That is astounding.


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## Chrissib

philadweller said:


> Wow forgive my ignorance. I heard that China has 100 cities with a population of 1,000,000 or more. That is astounding.


That is just because the cities in china are tens of thousands of km² big, so they have much people who actually don't live in the city itself but in the surrounding areas.


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## the spliff fairy

er nope, that was the case years ago, but not now as 3-400 million people move into urban areas from rural dwellers before, the largest migration of humans in history. 
Actually that would become thousands of cities if you just counted 'metros' as you say, small towns like Lijiang would number over a million..:


















...and there are thousands on thousands of similar sized places like this, not 100.


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## deranged

How can there be "thousands on thousands" of metros with over a million...


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## the spliff fairy

Basically you would need a town of a few hundred thousand in order to get a 'metro' of over a million, considering the frequency of Chinese villages every few km. There are many, many towns as such in China.

Thus these _shouldn't_ be considered 'cities' of over 1 million.


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## Onn

Chrissib said:


> That is just because the cities in china are tens of thousands of km² big, so they have much people who actually don't live in the city itself but in the surrounding areas.


The good majority of major cities in China are also located in the east, the west is mountainous. That means China has 1.3 billion people squished into....what is really a smaller piece of land than some may realize looking at a map. There are probably more towns and cities in close proximity to each other.


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## deranged

the spliff fairy said:


> Basically you would need a town of a few hundred thousand in order to get a 'metro' of over a million, considering the frequency of Chinese villages every few km. There are many, many towns as such in China.
> 
> Thus these _shouldn't_ be considered 'cities' of over 1 million.


I'm not doubting that - but if one was to use such an overly inclusive definition of "metropolitan area", Shanghai metro would include Hangzhou and Nanjing, the PRD would be one, etc. - making it mathematically impossible for there to be more than a few hundred separate million-metros, even if every person in China was a resident of a "metro".

On the other hand, using a more traditional metro area definition based on commuting patterns, there would likely be far more metros but of a far smaller mean size, with rural residents excluded. I would expect that once again, there would be a few hundred, and these would be comparable to other metro areas in the world.

Either way, it's certainly more than 100, and certainly less than thousands.


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## Herzarsen

Growth gives people jobs, and improves their living standard.


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## the spliff fairy

deranged said:


> I'm not doubting that - but if one was to use such an overly inclusive definition of "metropolitan area", Shanghai metro would include Hangzhou and Nanjing, the PRD would be one, etc. - making it mathematically impossible for there to be more than a few hundred separate million-metros, even if every person in China was a resident of a "metro".
> 
> On the other hand, using a more traditional metro area definition based on commuting patterns, there would likely be far more metros but of a far smaller mean size, with rural residents excluded. I would expect that once again, there would be a few hundred, and these would be comparable to other metro areas in the world.
> 
> Either way, it's certainly more than 100, and certainly less than thousands.


 I meant if they were to really count every 'city' (read: town) in China by its metro count, they would number in their thousands, as many many smaller towns are surrounded by so many villages in such a large area they will number over 1 million in the end, when the actual population is a fraction of that.


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## deranged

Precisely. In other words, if metropolitan areas are defined based on proximity to a given city, villages end up being wholly counted as part of numerous cities’ metropolitan areas, leading to duplication and inflated figures for thousands of cities, but meaningless as metro populations or otherwise.

While one could define hundreds of megalopoleis to counter the duplication problem, those would be meaningful, but would not resemble metropolitan areas. On the other hand, using only administrative boundaries would be absurd and give rise to nonsensical apples-to-oranges comparisons, alternately resembling cities proper, metropolitan areas or megalopoleis depending on the city in question.

The use of employment and commuting patterns, however, would result in a few hundred metropolitan areas which would be meaningful and comparable to those of other countries.

Essentially, we're both saying exactly the same thing; just in a different way.

---------------

Anyway, getting back on topic:

It will be very interesting to look back in 20-30 years' time, and observe the successes and failures of such dramatic change and the staggering collective movement of people. There is some irony to the manner in which such rapid development will take a considerable amount of time to truly appreciate.


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## hkskyline

*Ageing Shanghai urges 2nd baby for eligible couples *

BEIJING, July 24 (Reuters) - Shanghai is urging eligible couples to have two children as worries about the looming liability of an ageing population outweighs concerns about over-stretched resources, a city official said on Friday.

The policy marks the first time in decades Chinese officials have actively encouraged procreation.

China's famous "one child" policy is actually less rigorous than its name suggests, and allows urban parents to have two offspring if they are both only children. Rural couples are allowed a second child if their first is a girl.

This is still the official line in most of China, but the financial hub of Shanghai is now rich enough to focus on a new concern -- the burden of an ageing population of native-born Shanghainese.

More children would help relieve the heavy pressure from ageing people, said Zhang Meixin, a spokesman for the Shanghai Municipal Population and Family Planning Commission, adding that the basic population policy had not changed.

"Shanghai's over-60 population already exceeds 3 million, or 21.6 percent of registered residents," he told Reuters by telephone. "That is already near the average figure of developed countries and is still rising quickly."

Most newly-married couples registered in Shanghai are both only children and so may have two children, Zhang said.

The number of couples eligible to have two children rose from 4,600 in 2005 to 7,300 in 2008, he added.

"The current average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime is lower than one," Zhang said. "If all couples have children according to the policy, it would definitely help relieve pressure in the long term."

The U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies warned in April that by 2050 China would have more than 438 million people over 60 years of age, with more than 100 million aged 80 and above.

The country will have just 1.6 working-age adults to support every person aged 60 and above, compared with 7.7 in 1975.

But if Beijing changes tack on policy, it may not be difficult to shift the population balance.

Over two-thirds of women would like to have two or more children to prevent their children becoming spoilt or lonely, a senior official at the National Family Planning Commission said earlier this year.

While the population of those born in Shanghai is ageing fast, China's urban workforce is continuously replenished by migrants from the countryside, who are not registered residents.

China's underfunded state pension system and shrinking family size has removed a traditional layer of support for elders, leaving society ill-prepared to cope with an ageing population.

China aims to keep its overall population, the world's largest, below 1.36 billion by the end of next year.


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## Chrissib

Shanghai is in a very bad position. It's the only megacity in the world that has negative natural growth. And i doubt that an end of the one child policy could help that much. The people simply get used to only children and childless couples and then only wish to have one child, instead of two or three like in NA or Europe.


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## Whiteeclipse

*Urban population over 600m; urbanization rate 45.68%*
China's urban population reached 607 million people at the end of 2008, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development announced Sunday, according to Xinhua.

The country's urbanization rate was 45.68 percent - a huge increase from just 10 percent when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949.

China's total population is now over 1.30 billion, and the country's annual population growth rate was estimated to be 0.95 percent.

In the long term, China's urbanization rate is unlikely to slow down. The National Bureau of Statistics predicts that nearly 70 percent of China’s population will live in urban areas by 2050.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-08/24/content_8607993.htm


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## zenith_suv

the title of this thread which was started in 2006 has proved bang on , 607 million urban population is in touching distance of the 50% that was predicted earlier.


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## staff

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-08/27/content_8621552.htm


> *China's cities to receive massive influx*
> 
> By Fu Jing (China Daily)
> Updated: 2009-08-27 08:12
> Comments(5) PrintMail
> 
> *Some 300 million Chinese now living in rural areas -- the equivalent of the entire population of the United States -- will move into cities in the coming 15 to 20 years, said a senior Chinese official Wednesday.*
> 
> 
> The fast pace of urbanization will create at least 1 trillion yuan in annual investment opportunities in building water supply, waste treatment, heating and other public utilities in the cities, said Xu Zhongwei, deputy policy director of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.
> 
> China is undergoing rapid urbanization, with its rate increasing from 17 percent 30 years ago to 45 percent at the end of year, Xu said. *More than 600 million of China's 1.3 billion people already live in cities.*
> 
> *"This is an incredible speed and I am quite proud that we didn't see a huge increase of slums in the cities during the process*," Xu said.
> 
> In contrast, urbanization in other transitional economies, such as India, Brazil and South Africa, resulted in many slum areas.
> 
> *China's urbanization rate will increase by nearly 1 percent annually during the coming 15 to 20 years, which means that China will urbanize 300 million rural people during the period*, Xu said.
> 
> However, *compared with international average standards, Chinese cities are extremely dense*, Xu said.
> 
> *Statistics have shown that the population count per square kilometer in central parts of Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing has surpassed 50,000 to 60,000*. The world's average per square kilometer stands at just 10,000. Currently, the Chinese government's plans call for 120 square meters of living space per person, taking into account all aspects of life, such as housing, parks, roads, schools and other public utilities.
> 
> "The standard is too low and I personally believe we should double the standards and decrease density of cities," said Xu.
> 
> The cities in China just cover 80,000 square kilometers of land in the country and if it the standard is doubled, it will be increased to 160,000 square kilometers.
> 
> At the same time, the government is implementing tough policies to protect arable land and taking cautious steps to expand cities.
> 
> "We need a balanced policy to prevent people from living a poor urban life in high-rise buildings," said Xu. "If that happens, fast urbanization is meaningless."
> 
> Yu Lei, a young resident in Chongqing, said he is fed up with living and working in the downtown area.
> 
> "I want to move to the suburbs and buy an apartment there but the long commuting between the center and the suburban region has made me shelve the plan," said Yu, who lives near the city's business center Jiefangbei.
> 
> But James Jao, a Chinese-American expert on urban planning, said that China should insist on intensively using land when constructing cities and the current standard should be kept.
> 
> China should include green space in its urban planning, as well as mass transit, said Jao, who is also president of Longon Group, which has advised many cities in China on urban planning.


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## Atmosphere

_
By 2025 China's urban population is expected to rise to 926 million from 572 million in 2005 -- an increase equal to the entire current population of the United States, according to management consultants McKinsey & Company. By 2030 that number will increase to a billion.

Over the next two decades China will build 20,000 to 50,000 new skyscrapers -- the equivalent of ten New York cities, according to McKinsey._

I just came back from Shanghai where I was overwhelmed bij its size (in a positive way) but reading these numbers makes your head explode. I can't image cities with 60 million + people in it.


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## Ukraine

OMFG! this is scary...Cant see cities be 60 million +. Holy Shit!!


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## Chrissib

Ukraine said:


> OMFG! this is scary...Cant see cities be 60 million +. Holy Shit!!


Yes it will be incredible. I hope that Shanghai will reach 60 million people.


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## Atmosphere

I don't know if that's good for the city. Every city has a city center right. Well in a city that big you would need multiple city center or else it will become too crowded. The problem is you can't build a second or third history museum. There always will be one real city center with unique museums and other sites that everyone wants to visit. You would need roads with 30+ lanes and 20 or more subway lines to get everything going

Urban planners will have a very hard but exciting time in China the coming years.


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## Chrissib

Atmosphere said:


> I don't know if that's good for the city. Every city has a city center right. Well in a city that big you would need multiple city center or else it will become too crowded. The problem is you can't build a second or third history museum. There always will be one real city center with unique museums and other sites that everyone wants to visit. You would need roads with 30+ lanes and 20 or more subway lines to get everything going
> 
> Urban planners will have a very hard but exciting time in China the coming years.


But we see that it works in Tokyo, which has a whopping 35 million people. You could still build more subways or motorways. If you want to run a city with 60 million people, you need the best public transit system in the world.


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## oliver999

Chrissib said:


> Yes it will be incredible. I hope that Shanghai will reach 60 million people.


if tokyo can be 35 million, then shanghai can be 60 logically. but i still can't image a 60 million pop shanghai, my city (120km west of shanghai) maybe involved.


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## Chrissib

oliver999 said:


> if tokyo can be 35 million, then shanghai can be 60 logically. but i still can't image a 60 million pop shanghai, my city (120km west of shanghai) maybe involved.


I thought of 60 million within the municipality.:cheers:


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## hkskyline

*FEATURE-Urbanising China long way from residence reform *
11 March 2010

BEIJING, March 11 (Reuters) - They build the skyscrapers and lay the highways, mind the city children, sew the clothes and tend the shops, but China's army of migrant labourers are still fundamentally aliens in the country's bustling urban centers.

Despite a push for reform ahead of this week's annual legislative meeting, the household registration, or hukou, system is likely to stay in place for the near future, slowing China's rapid urbanisation by denying city services to its estimated 200 million migrant workers.

Granting them rights in cities could encourage them to spend more, fulfilling the goals of central planners to raise Chinese consumption and reduce dependence on export markets.

Reformers were disappointed when Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who has made fairness and reducing income disparities a hallmark of his administration, called for relaxing the hukou requirements only in small and medium cities in his work report this month.

He didn't mention giving migrants equal treatment outside their provinces, or in China's biggest cities.

As evidence the central authorities are not open to radical change, editorials calling for abolishment of the hukou system were removed from most of the websites of 13 regional newspapers. The papers had launched a rare coordinated call for reform earlier this month.

The deputy editor who wrote the editorial for the Economic Observer was fired, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Defenders of the system contend cities are unable to provide the services migrants demand in the absence of a nationwide and transferable social security network.

"The main problem with changing this system is some powerful opposition, especially from the public security apparatus and the city governments who face a really high cost," said Dorothy Solinger, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who has written about China's hukou system.

"They'd have to expand schools for migrants as well as pensions and benefits for people who have moved temporarily, or even permanently, to the cities. There's been a real plea from city governments not to burden them."

Police oppose the abolition of the hukou system because they would lose control over China's "floating population," many of whom are poor. Migrants convicted of crimes often end up serving harsher sentances, because of confusion over jurisdictions, prisoners' rights advocate, the Dui Hua Foundation, said.

FLOW OF REMITTANCES

Hukous date from the famines of the late 1950s, during Mao Zedong's disastrous experiment with collective farms. Rations were tied to where people were registered, keeping starving peasants from flooding into better-fed cities.

Half a century later, a new generation of migrants call the cities home, with nary a glance back at the fields their grandparents tilled.

Reform would let them buy houses and bring their children to live with them, slowing the flow of remittances to villages.

"If I could change things, I'd get a Beijing hukou right away," said Lu Zhaolu, a carefully made-up woman from Northeast China whose 16-year-old attends a school for migrants in Beijing.

"There are a lot of advantages. For instance, I could apply for a mortgage to buy an apartment. Now I can't get a loan."

The migrant families who have settled in Beijing are now so permanent that city officials tolerate, but do not certify, about 260 schools each with 400-500 migrant students.

Several of those schools fell victim to developers' bulldozers this winter, along with surrounding communities of makeshift housing.

"By sixth grade, some of our pupils have been through 15 schools. This really affects their education," said Li Dengfeng, who runs a school for migrant children in Beijing's outskirts.

Most migrant children only make it through junior high before dropping out to become labourers themselves, Li said.

Many jurisdictions have abolished the distinction between residents of urban and rural districts, in response to the rapid urbanisation that has swallowed former villages into city sprawl.

That could help foster development of smaller cities throughout China, creating jobs closer to family and diverting labour from export centres like Guangdong. Localised shortages this month have led to talk of wage hikes.

FARAWAY FACTORIES

"Those who have been working outside the province for a long time already have quite settled jobs, already have homes," said Zhang Zuoha, vice-governor of Sichuan province, which contributes 20 million rural people to the national labour pool.

"In each place they want to be accepted, get a household registration and resolve their household registration problems."

No reforms have yet bridged provincial lines, even though the factories of the south and the coast attract migrant workers from thousands of miles and many provinces away.

Pension and medical insurance plans designed to allow workers to transfer between jobs generally don't cross provincial lines, so workers are reluctant to pay into them.

That has resulted in one of the biggest contributions that migrant workers have made to China's economic growth -- their lack of legal protection has helped keep Chinese wages low.

"There's more paperwork for outsiders to find jobs, and the salaries tend to be lower," said Shi Jing, a young migrant shopkeeper with bleached hair and a fashionable green coat and leggings. "The job agencies don't trust outsiders as much."

Chinese such as Shi who have been migrants for more than a generation have little attachment to the hometowns where they are supposed to return for paperwork, medical reimbursements or for children to attend officially recognised schools.

"We need to change our attitudes towards migrants," said Chang Dechuan, president of Qingdao Port Group. "The old attitude was to use them because their wages are cheaper, and they cost less than city residents. I think this is outdated,"

"Nowadays, migrants are no longer just unskilled peasants."


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## desertpunk

^^ Outstanding article and very informative!


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## siriusbsns

China is still slowly "phasing out" the old hutongs, aren't they? I know they've protected some in Beijing but they're going to need space for expansion sooner or later if people continue to migrate into the cities. Hopefully the hutongs don't disappear completely.


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## Atmosphere

siriusbsns said:


> China is still slowly "phasing out" the old hutongs, aren't they? I know they've protected some in Beijing but they're going to need space for expansion sooner or later if people continue to migrate into the cities. Hopefully the hutongs don't disappear completely.


Yes part of Beijings fun and beauty are the Hutongs. Some areas are restored and cleaned but they change more and more nonetheless. With the olympics many streets got asphalt for example. I saw some parts being replaces by huge shopping malls. A sad thing but understandable as more and more people move to the cities. I think the real old Hutongs wont last long. The small areas that are being preserved will become very touristic and the classic old Hutongs will slowly disappear...


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## the spliff fairy

its a shame, but for a city at last count with 22 million (including non-permanent residents) there's little urban planning devoted to preserving a one storey centre. Though a few hundred streets have been saved, there used to be thousands.

The original hutongs were once elegant middle class homes, but over the years became subdivided as the population grew, and bastardised by brick add ons and outhouses (and for hundreds of years the council enforced the one or two storey rule - no building could be higher than the Forbidden Citys great halls), to the point the average Beijinger enjoyed 1 sq. metre of living space by the 1990s.

The old days, when hutongs were large courtyard homes:


























1990s - vibrant and full of traditional life -yet they had become slums, or unrecognisable as old buildings











































the same area (Qianmen) after restoration:


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## Celebriton

^^That place look very beautiful.



Celebriton said:


> *Focusing on future urbanization*
> By Andrew Moody and Lan Lan (China Daily)
> Updated: 2010-03-22 09:35
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Stone carvings of dragon heads on a wall in Chongqing municipality. The southwestern city is among several first and second tier cities across the country that plan to head local economic growth with dragon-like tenacity over the next few decades.[China Foto Press]
> 
> 
> 
> New megacities will witness 325 million more people moving to the urban environment from the countryside, report Andrew Moody and Lan Lan in Beijing
> 
> Vast Megacities - the like of which have never been seen in the world before - could pave the way to a cleaner environmental future for China, according to a leading environmental lobby group.
> 
> By 2025, China will have eight giant cities - Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin and Wuhan - with a population of more than 10 million each, according to international management consultants McKinsey & Co.
> 
> They will be part of a massive urbanization trend that will see 325 million more people living in cities in less than a generation.
> 
> Wu Changhua, Greater China director of The Climate Group, the international environmental lobby organization, said it was possible to deliver energy and essential services more efficiently to concentrated urban areas.
> 
> "Urbanization is regarded as one of the solutions to energy and climate change issues. You can achieve a much more efficient use of energy," she said.
> 
> She added planners in China have the opportunity to fashion new cities that will be effectively carbon neutral, making use of state-of-the-art technology.
> 
> "China is in a different position from the United States when it developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Climate change and carbon emissions were not issues then and you put steel factories right in the center of cities like Pittsburgh," she said.
> 
> But the speed of China's development will still make it hard for urban planners to contain the environmental risks.
> 
> By 2030, 120 million people will live in China's megacities, an increase from 34 million in 2007 when only Beijing and Shanghai were classed in this category, according to McKinsey.
> 
> Chongqing, which could be set to be China's first 30 million population city, has been growing at six time the rates it took Chicago to develop in the 50 years before 1900.
> 
> It has grown from a collection of towns and villages to become one of the world's greatest new conurbations.
> 
> Martin Jacques, author of "When China Rules The World", which predicts China will overtake the United States as the world's largest economy by 2050, said the emergence of megacities will create huge challenges.
> 
> "China will have to come up with novel solutions to the challenges this rate of development poses. It cannot just blindly copy the development of cities in the West," he said.
> 
> "Clearly cities cannot be built around the car because when car ownership got up to western levels the cities would come to a complete standstill."
> 
> 
> 
> Megacities emerging
> 
> Ma Xiaohe, vice-president of the Academy of Macroeconomic Research at the National Development and Reform Commission of China in Beijing, envisages megacities emerging with small and medium sized cities in small clusters around them.
> 
> "The larger cities can then share resources with the small and medium sized cities creating logistical benefits and a big labor pool and also reducing overall costs," he said.
> 
> "This megacity development is the most efficient option for a country like China with high population density and rare land and water resources."
> 
> He said the danger for cities and towns that are not part of these new urban clusters is that they could get left behind.
> 
> "The economies of areas outside the urban clusters could eventually wither. This has been the case in Japan, where 70 per cent of GDP (gross domestic product) is generated from just the three areas of Tokyo, Osaka and Nogoya," he said.
> 
> China is likely to follow a different model to urbanization in Western countries. In Britain, the first industrial nation, people moved from rural areas to work in factories in new emerging cities such as Manchester in the early 19th century.
> 
> China's megacities are more likely to be service sector orientated than hot beds of manufacturing employment.
> 
> The lure to move to the city will still be the same - to achieve a better standard of living, even though the realties of urban living might be somewhat harsher than expected.
> 
> 
> 
> Service jobs
> 
> Prof Lu Bin, head of the department of urban and regional planning at Peking University, doubts whether there will be enough service jobs in the megacities to support the size of their populations.
> 
> "That is why it is important to have small and medium sized cities supporting the core city. The smaller cities could offer manufacturing employment and people could commute within the conurbation," he said.
> 
> "All the various hubs within the great metropolis will feed off each other to a certain extent and there will be an interchange of economic activity and people."
> 
> Just 600 million people, or 45 per cent of China's 1.3 billion population, currently live in cities but this is expected to grow to more than 1 billion by 2030.
> 
> Some 70 per cent of the new urban dwellers will be migrants from mainly rural areas.
> 
> Pu Yufei, a leading researcher at the State Information Center, the government think tank, based in Beijing, said this level of urbanization would provide a major boost to the economy.
> 
> "The process of urbanization will create enormous business opportunities and also create demand for goods and services, " he said.
> 
> He added that former farmers often prove to be successful entrepreneurs when they move to cities.
> 
> 
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> 
> Two residential buildings in suburban Tongzhou district in southeastern Beijing. As the municipal government plans to build a new downtown for China's capital city in Tongzhou, the price of homes in the district is increasing sharply. [China Foto Press]
> 
> 
> 
> About farmers
> 
> "Many farmers may set up their own business and become entrepreneurs. Many of them set up businesses related to their agricultural backgrounds because they have a good understanding of what the market needs. They also tend to be very hard working," he said.
> 
> "A number of billionaires have been created this way and I expect there to be many more."
> 
> Wu at The Climate Group said new emerging cities offered the chance to redress China's concentration of population on the eastern seaboard with the creation of new cities in the central and western parts of the country.
> 
> She added there was a need to avoid the urban sprawl of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.
> 
> "Is Beijing energy efficient? The answer is no. It is a city that has developed over many years and hasn't been planned around energy efficiency, " she said.
> 
> "Today if you have a piece of land and are going to build a new city, there are tools out there to make sure that it is built around its energy and water needs. Everything can be integrated so much better."
> 
> British author Jacques said it was important to understand how far China had traveled on the urbanization journey. In 1949 at the birth of New China it only had five cities with more than one million population.
> 
> "China is currently either at the end of the beginning stage or, at best, the beginning of the middle stage of urbanization," he said
> 
> He added that megacities offered a solution because of the land scarcity in China compared with other countries.
> 
> "When the United States developed land was never an issue. The United States today is only a quarter as densely populated as China. You need to concentrate people to accommodate the numbers of people," he said.
> 
> Prof Lu at Peking University believes urbanization and the growth of megacities will be the engine of economic growth for the Chinese economy in the coming decades.
> 
> "It will be a process that will help drive the economy forward to the next stage as we leave the current economic crisis behind," he said.
> 
> http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2010-03/22/content_9621374.htm


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## hkskyline

*SPECIAL REPORT-China bets future on inland cities*

GUSHI, China, Aug 3 (Reuters) - China has put big money down on a momentous gamble: rush to build new cities in its poor interior, then wait for people to come and help drive the economy to a new stage of growth.

Here in this corner of the Chinese hinterland, the government has widened farm lanes into highways, turned wheat fields into an industrial park, spent a fortune on government offices, and set up a school for thousands of students in what was a dusty town a few years before.

Old, cracked gravestones have been bulldozed to make way for a housing estate featuring 60 apartment buildings, a winding creek and tennis courts, the latest such development in Gushi.

But the roads are mostly deserted apart from the odd goat herd trundling along them. The industrial park features a handful of workshops and no big factories. Vast new housing estates fan out from the original town centre, most of them uninhabited. Skeletons of half-built villas, stained from neglect, are splayed across fields.

About 1,000 km (600 miles) south of Beijing in Henan province, Gushi is a microcosm of this latest face of China's urbanisation, featuring ambitious officials, angry farmers, countryside capitalists, a new batch of consumers -- and empty buildings.

Over the past three decades, rural migrants flocked to big, prosperous cities along the coast. Now, in its revamped model of urbanisation, the government is trying to bring cities to its farmers, a project that could absorb more residents than the entire population of the United States in the coming decades.

Farmers such as Xiang Wenjiang are not at all sure they like what they see rising up from their muddy fields.

"This is my land, but now it's all been sold," said the wiry, sun-beaten Xiang, eyeing a row of apartments under construction advancing towards his hut. "I won't leave until they give us the right money for moving, not just a few coins."

The apartment complex encroaching on Xiang's land is part of a vast urban development juggernaut that has become a new engine of economic growth as global demand sputters. It offers enormous opportunities for the companies that dig up the raw materials needed to build the new cities; that make the cars for the new roads and the washing machines for the new homes.

But such high hopes come with ample scope for disappointment. If the unprecedented population shift from villages to cities is mismanaged, it could squander resources, radicalize peasants and damage China's prospects.

RUSHING TO CATCH UP

With 1.7 million people, Gushi is the most populous county in Henan and one of the biggest in the nation. Locals boast it sends out more workers to cities than any other county in China.

This annual flow from farms to factories is at the heart of how China's economy, a welterweight in global terms in 1980, will become the world's biggest in a little more than a decade.

"You are going to see smaller cities being created out of townships, townships created from villages," said Jing Ulrich, chairman of China equities at JP Morgan.

"I do believe in the long-term thesis that playing this urbanisation trend, playing consumption growth on the back of urbanisation and income growth, this is probably one of the brighter spots in the global economy."

Like much of central China, Gushi has been in a rush to catch up with the wealthier coastal regions.

"Failing to develop is the worst kind of corruption," Guo Yongchang said before he fell from power as Communist Party chief of Gushi in 2008. "If you'd prefer not to develop, and you don't get close to businesspeople, then it's more evil than corruption a hundred times over."

That sort of cockiness led to his downfall. He and another former head of Gushi county have been accused of graft. Buildings for a new university that went bankrupt stand abandoned. The town's main factory also went bankrupt.

Villagers denouncing corruption and resisting the loss of farms have turned a strip of land where their fields meet the expanding township into a protest battleground.

"The local officials force the farmers to sell the land for very little. Here there are no controls," said Zhao Jiuzhou, a 24-year-old in jeans, watching local farmers dig the foundations of a new apartment block.

"If you foreigners want to develop here in Gushi, it would be like Cinderella being eaten by the big wolf," he added, mismatching his fairy tales. "Here the officials can make a killing from nothing".

Gushi is not alone. Multiply its problems across thousands of towns and small cities across China, and the risks of the country's headlong rush towards urbanisation become evident.

Yet if the pitfalls are clear so is the potential. Between now and 2040, China's urban population will expand by up to 400 million, according to Han Jun, a rural policy expert who advises the government. In other words, cities will absorb about 15 million new residents every year.

"That means growth," Stephen Green, chief China economist at Standard Chartered, told Reuters Insider TV. "And it means better education and health care. It means higher labour productivity and higher wages. People living in urban areas tend to consume more. So this is really the crux of China's transition into a wealthier, more balanced economy, and the faster it happens, the better."

THE NEW CONSUMERS

From the window of Duan Guofei's new apartment, Gushi's ambition to leap from sleepy town to grandiose city begins to look more plausible -- even if it is not happening as fast as they might like in terms of creating jobs.

Duan and his wife, Rang Fei, live in Xiangzhang Garden, a housing development where many apartments have been sold and real estate agents give tours to a stream of prospective buyers.

Their apartment is decorated with soft-focus wedding portraits, and a large flat-screen television sits across from their glass coffee table. It is a far cry from the mud-brick village homes they grew up in. Duan's parents were farmers and his wife's father a village teacher.

The young couple is part of a generational shift in rural China. They have worked in far-off cities, too costly and officially unwelcoming to offer them a permanent home, and yet they feel too attached to urban life to return to their home villages.

"Before you used to build a house in your home village," Duan said. "Now everyone is buying in the county seat. All my parent's relatives have moved here, because life is so much easier."

Gushi, which lies in a remote corner of Henan province bordering on rural Anhui province, is an intense example of how migration has transformed the Chinese countryside.

About 500,000 of its 1.7 million population work elsewhere as migrants in factories, shops or offices or as merchants, said Cai Liming, deputy head of the county propaganda department. The county government is betting it can draw these migrants back to buy homes, invest their savings and create jobs. But many find only disappointment when they migrate back.

"There's some work here but the wages are lower," said Wu Anxia, who moved here from Shanghai to ensure her son went to a decent school, because government restrictions barred children of migrants from good ones in Shanghai. "I was a warehouse manager in Shanghai," Wu said. "But back here in Gushi, there's nothing. So I became a cleaner."

In the first phase of urbanisation, from the start of the country's post-Mao reform era in 1978 to the present, rural citizens began migrating to booming coastal towns from Tianjin in the north to Shenzhen in the south. About 140 million made the trek last year.

Few of these migrants stay on. The hukou system of residency registration deprives them of benefits, such as public education, away from their home villages. Only 19 percent of rural migrants had settled permanently in cities as of 2004, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

In the new phase of urbanisation, the government's strategy is not to move farmers to big coastal cities, but to draw them to new urban areas in the hinterland. Its clearest expression came in the Communist Party's No. 1 Document in January, a policy blueprint for 2010. In it, China vowed to reform the hukou system by giving rural citizens the right to the same services as urbanites -- but only if they move to small cities within their own province.

By 2025, the country will have 221 cities with populations of a million or more, compared to 35 in Europe, according to a report by McKinsey & Co, the consultancy firm. China had 108 such cities in 2004.

But whereas work awaited migrants who flocked to factories on the coast over the past two decades, the creation of cities and employment by decree in the interior is less of a sure thing.

China tried once before to develop small cities in a hukou reform experiment in the 1990s.

"There was not much success because of the limited employment opportunities and poor public services in small cities," said Tao Ran, an economist at Renmin University in Beijing. The modern furnishings in Duan and Rang's apartment in Xiangzhang Garden cannot gloss over Gushi's shaky prospects for creating lasting jobs. Duan earns about 2,000 yuan ($295) a month decorating homes. But officials fret the property sector, the pillar of the town's economy, will suffer as empty apartments pile up.

OFFICIAL AMBITION

The man who presided over Gushi's transformation now waits out his days in a detention cell. Guo Yongchang was the Communist Party secretary of the county for four years, before his fall in a cloud of corruption charges last year. One of his subordinates, Fu Kongdao, the deputy head of the county in charge of land decisions, committed suicide in early 2009.

Guo's ambitions for the town, and for himself, are visible across Gushi, and so are the costs. They are seen in the 10-storey polished stone building that dominates the new government compound, in the expansive square next to it, and in the unfinished villas marooned on once-fertile farmland.

"If everyone moved into the county seat, they still couldn't fill all these homes," said Zhou Jun, a taxi driver, as she drove past acres of unoccupied and neglected apartments. Zhou says she can tell which apartments are empty by looking for the air conditioner units outside windows. If they are missing, no one is living inside. Her car passes one building block with 72 windows, just two with air conditioners.

In the curt official announcement, the reason given for Guo's dismissal was corruption at a post before he became boss of Gushi. But residents believe his misdeeds continued, and grew enormously, when he was head of the county.

"He got too greedy, took too much. Here, you could take land, sell it cheaply and make millions," said Ren Jun, a small-time investor in the Gushi property market.

Guo came to Gushi in 2004 with bright hopes for himself and for this town. With his credentials as a lawyer and reputation as a hard-driving official, he itched to launch Gushi and himself onto a bigger stage by working hand-in-glove with local capitalists. "Run the government like it's a business. Run a city like it's a commodity," Guo once told Decision Making magazine, a Chinese business publication.

He was not shy about putting that philosophy into practice. When a local businessman opened a luxury bathhouse -- one of many such businesses across China where businessmen and officials go for saunas and massages -- Guo made sure he and other senior county officials turned up for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. "We must treat businesspeople better," said Guo, according to the 2005 magazine interview. "We've got to bathe with them."

Gushi offered developers cheap land, and lots of it, defying repeated efforts by the country's top leaders to slow land grabs for development.

"The central government has told local governments to entirely freeze land (requisitions), so we must speed up land seizures and seize up to 10,000 mu (1,650 acres) of land. Otherwise, what will we have to develop the city?" Guo told officials, according to a report in the Southern Metropolitan Daily, a Chinese newspaper, in June of this year.

Some of that land went to two vast housing projects -- Phoenix New Town and Xinhe New Town. In return, the developers provided the county government with a stream of revenue that helped pay for new office buildings and monuments.

Near the main government building sits the county outpost of China's central bank. Its carved stone walls and a fountain covered in stone frogs look as if they were torn from an aristocratic European manor and plopped on the plains of Henan. An equally ornate museum, celebrating Gushi's small role as a cradle of the communist revolution, stands empty by the square.

In better days, Gushi's transformation from poor backwater to an urbanising model brought Guo and his government kudos and admiring visits from senior officials. Among them was Xu Guangchun, the Communist Party secretary of Henan province, who told Guo the county had set an example for the province to emulate. "Your ideas are golden," Xu told him.

HOOKED ON LAND

Much of this urban charge is being led by officials aiming to literally leave their mark on the landscape, boosting their career prospects and sometimes their personal wealth. China's worry is that the troubled trajectory of Guo Yongchang is being duplicated, in some way or another, in cities and towns across the country.

Local officials have huge powers over land and investment. But in their ambition to transform dusty towns into aspiring cities, they are leaving behind worrisome levels of government debt and a model of sprawling urbanisation that will exact a toll on the economy and society over time.

Partly it is a case of perverse incentives. Local governments in China have become "hooked on land," in the words of Tao Ran, the economist at Renmin University. A reform of the taxation system in 1994 shifted the lion's share of tax revenues to the central government and left provinces, cities and especially towns with bigger burdens. Over time, they saw that land could plug the gap. Seized cheaply from farmers, it is sold for a tidy profit to developers, many of whom count on cheap funding from state-owned banks to bankroll their construction projects.

Chinese finances are in good health, at least in official terms. The government says its total debt is just 20 percent of gross domestic product, compared with about 80 percent in the United States and nearly 200 percent in Japan. But officials acknowledge the picture is grimmer when local government debt loads are added.

Though legally barred from borrowing, provinces and cities have found ways around the restrictions, often through government-backed investment firms. These financing vehicles have borrowed a total of 7.7 trillion yuan ($1.1 trillion) from banks, according to the China Banking Regulatory Commission. That alone would about double the national debt, and some suspect the total is higher. Realising the potential scope of the problem, the regulator warned banks at the start of this year to limit their lending to local governments.

For years, Gushi had been running full tilt in the opposite direction, trying to find ways to catalyse investment and escape restrictions on local debt. Some of the spending that Gushi routed through its financing units may yet prove worthwhile. In a list of development projects for 2009, the County Construction Investment Co was named as the developer of a water supply plant. It was also listed as the main investor in a hotel and entertainment complex, a questionable need in a town that already had a new hotel and few visitors.

Other examples of wasted land and money litter Gushi's landscape. The abandoned "Heyuan University" campus sits on the edge of town, sinking back into the fields that were taken to build it. A couple of guards mind the crumbling buildings after the investors fled a couple of years ago.

"They've run away and left us with these rotten buildings," said Fu Jinzhi, a wrinkled woman in her 70s living in a village near the campus. "We've been hurt, but what can we do?"

The sheer numbers involved in China's urbanisation are staggering.

To accommodate the onrush of new city dwellers, the country will have to pave 5 billion square metres of road, construct 5 million buildings, including 50,000 skyscrapers, and add up to 170 mass transit systems, the McKinsey report said. All by 2025, it added.

In such haste, mistakes are made.

"This has happened so quickly that the cities have not had an opportunity to grow organically. And there is a real risk that what you are going to be left with is these cities that are very sprawling," said Arthur Kroeber of Dragonomics, an economic consultancy in Beijing.

Little thought is given to energy efficiency or quality of life by officials whose main objective is to build and build some more, he said.

Some Chinese officials have started to muse about the need for slower economic growth, down from the double-digit pace which has been the norm for much of the past decade.

"A slower pace of growth might well be beneficial, because when everything is booming, no one has any incentive to do anything at all carefully," Kroeber said.

BUSINESS ELITE

If Party Secretary Guo was the force behind Gushi's feverish excess, Chen Feng was the man who did the heavy lifting. But while Guo now sits in jail, Chen has catapulted himself into the ranks of Henan's business elite.

Chairman of Xinhe Real Estate, Chen is Gushi's biggest property developer, the man who has built the homes for migrants who have returned with money and middle-class aspirations.

At the centre of Gushi stand three Xinhe developments, modern, sleek, and carefully landscaped. Chen's latest project, Golden Sun, is a 60-building housing estate.

Like most successful real estate barons in China, Chen's government connections run deep. He has been a member of the county parliament and has made Xinhe a virtual handmaiden to official development plans, building 6 sq kms of government offices and public facilities, including schools. Xinhe knows the schools are a big selling point. Each family buying an apartment in Xiangzhang Garden is promised a 20 percent discount on school fees.

Education is one of the yawning gaps between rural and urban China that have made the interior so unappealing -- a place that people aspire to leave.

"It's the pattern across all of the country," said Li Changping, the rural affairs expert. "Officials are concentrating school spending in counties and large towns, so then parents are forced to move to them for the sake of their children."

Like most successful businessmen in China, Chen has been nimble, too. Over the past year, as Gushi tried to change its development strategy after Guo was detained, Chen tried to change Xinhe's focus.

"The company has answered the government's call to build a strong industrialised county, and we have made a strategic shift in the company from a real estate developer into an industrial firm," Xinhe said in a statement in June, marking its investment in a factory for medical infusion bags.

In a sign of its growing stature in official eyes, the company was rechristened this May as Henan Xinhe Construction and Investment Group. The insertion of the province's name came with explicit government approval and will make it easier for the firm to win contracts beyond Gushi.

This potent cocktail of state power, big money and heady urban ambitions can be seen across China, especially in the rural hinterlands.

Henan is one of the poorest major provinces, with just 36 percent of its population living in cities. The province has made rapid expansion of cities a cornerstone of development.

Xinyang, the largest city in southern Henan, has built an 18-storey headquarters for its Communist Party officials overlooking a vast square. City leaders believe the imposing government buildings will attract more investors, the mayor of Xinyang, Guo Ruimin, told Reuters.

The grey expanse of concrete with low shrubs around its edge was not a public square, he said. "It's a botanical garden planted with many flowers."

In Nanyang, a city of over a million residents about two hours drive from Xinyang, multi-storey apartment and office buildings have mushroomed in the new "high-tech" development district.

"These are pretty buildings, but when you're as old as I am, you get dizzy just looking at them," said Xiao Chunqi, gazing at a cluster of four 30-story apartment buildings rising next to her village in Nanyang.

FESTERING DISCONTENT

Chinese law says farmland is collectively owned by villages. In reality, the land is controlled by local governments. They, not the farmers, have the power to decide who can turn fields into real estate. Farmers say land reclamation rules are fixed against them, giving officials and well-connected developers the power to push them off the land without fair compensation.

"The main trouble facing urbanisation is the waste of land, because in China it's just too easy to take farmers' land for a pittance," said Dang Guoying, a rural development expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who is studying the challenge of urban growth. "So our new cities have these broad roads and big parks, townhouses -- such a waste of land".

These festering discontents could stoke sharper social unrest as urbanisation accelerates, some Chinese researchers have said.

"The path of urbanisation that China has pursued over the past 30 years is no better than the slum development of Latin America and India," wrote Zhou Tianyong, an economic and social researcher at the Central Party School, a leading institute in Beijing. "Moreover, if this path of urbanisation is not adjusted and continues, the outcomes will undoubtedly create much social turmoil," Zhou wrote in a recent overview of urbanisation.

In Gushi, signs of that are not hard to find. Some protesters are demanding political and economic reforms that could challenge the top-down control of the ruling Communist Party. (Click on xxx for related story)

"The land defence movement in Gushi is like a rising wind," said one petition from disgruntled farmers. "Wherever there is oppression, there is also resistance."

Zhou Decai, a veteran protester in Gushi, disclosed plans for a nationwide campaign to link up disgruntled farmers demanding a better deal from the loss of their land. He held out pictures that he said showed battles over land involving dozens, sometimes, hundreds of villagers.

"The reckless development in my area has been slowed, but it's because of farmers' resistance, not because of government orders," Zhou said. The land system needs to be reformed so farmers can decide whether to sell their land -- and reap the benefits themselves, he said.

Yet even the discontented farmers could see no way of stopping a tide of urbanisation from engulfing the countryside. Many of their sons and daughters are moving to factories and apartments, while they stick to the barricades.

"Urbanisation is an inevitable trend. It's not whether you want it or not. There's no choice," said Zhou. "But this urbanisation path is a deformed bubble."

($1=6.776 Yuan) (Editing by Bill Tarrant)


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## hkskyline

*HEARD ON THE STREET: Shades Of Gray In China's Income Levels *
11 August 2010
Dow Jones International News

The good news: Chinese people have more money, on average, than most analysts realize.

The bad news: Most of that extra wealth lies with the already-rich, widening income inequality beyond that suggested by official figures. This crowd is often supplementing its earnings with 'gray' income which can include kickbacks, bribes and the like.

These are the conclusions of academic research into China's real income levels by Wang Xiaolu, of the China Reform Foundation, an economic development research group. Happily, the sponsor of the research, Credit Suisse, provides a silver lining: Its analysts have thoughtfully proposed a number of stocks and sectors that could benefit from the fact that China's filthy rich are both filthier, and richer, than they seem at first sight.

Based on a detailed look at spending and income patterns in China in 2008, Wang estimates China's average urban household income is 90% higher than official data. His figures suggest the top 10% of Chinese households are 3.2 times richer than public data shows, while the second decile's income is 2.1 times higher.

Behind this official underestimate of Chinese household wealth lies what Wang terms 'gray' income, such as government and party officials receiving outsize cash gifts when their offspring marry, or benefiting from a bit of insider trading in the property market, or receiving under-the-table payments in return for favorable treatment. Such items contributed to total hidden income in 2008 of nearly $1.4 trillion, equivalent to roughly 30% of China's GDP.

One corollary, that the gap between China's rich and poor is becoming ever wider, is a worrying social problem. Still, not to let corruption and inequality get too much in the way of a good investment story, Credit Suisse's takeaway is that there could be even more latent potential in the Chinese consumer story than investors currently suppose. That's good news for luxury goods providers like LVMH or BMW, for Chinese property developers, and for gambling companies with a big presence in Macau.

Rather than a consumption basket, maybe call this one a corruption basket.

(Andrew Peaple, a Columnist on Dow Jones' Heard on the Street team, has been a financial journalist since 2003. Currently based in Beijing he has also covered the U.K. economy and financial services, and is a U.K.-qualified chartered accountant.)


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## hkskyline

_Some more : _

*Hidden trillions widen China's wealth gap - report*

BEIJING, Aug 12 (Reuters) - China's richest citizens are even wealthier than the statistics suggest, and may hold as much as 9.3 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) of hidden assets, according to a Credit Suisse-sponsored study by a top economic think-tank.

Official statistics for 2008 failed to capture income equivalent to about 30 percent of China's gross domestic product, the "Analysing Chinese Grey Income" report found.

And nearly two thirds of that unreported income goes into the pockets of the richest 10 percent, widening China's already troubling wealth gap, said Wang Xiaolu, the economist at the China Society of Economic Reform (CSER), who headed the survey.

The findings may explain in part Beijing's tolerance of recent strikes in manufacturing zones, and official emphasis on ensuring more equitable division of wealth, the report added.

Average per-capital income for the richest 10 percent, at 97,000 yuan, was 65 times of that of the poorest 10 percent, Wang's survey showed -- instead of the 23 times figure given by official National Statistics Bureau's household income survey.

"It means the wealth gap is widening, and the distribution of national income is becoming more and more unfair," it concluded.

A fairer income distribution could ease social tensions and support Beijing's plan to boost domestic consumption.

"One very interesting observation to argue for the highly uneven income distribution in China is reflected in the strong buying power of its richest people," the report said.

China accounted for 3 percent of sales for a brand like Volkswagen and 5 percent for Pepsi, while for luxury retailers like Richemont and Swatch Group, it made up 20 and 28 percent respectively.

"So if income distribution becomes more equitable, it would help boost the consumer market."

ASK YOUR FRIENDS

The team that did the research chose an unusual method to counter a perceived tendency, particularly among high-income families, to lie about the "grey income" that makes up the majority of their earnings.

The survey team contacted only family, friends and colleagues, who would be more likely to tell the truth, trust that data would be kept anonymous and whose answers could more easily be assessed for veracity.

The report suggested actual urban income was around double official levels. The gap between earnings recorded in National Bureau of Statistics Data, and Chinese citizens' real earnings and assets, also grew rapidly from the "middle income group" and up, to become a yawning gulf for the richest.

The grey income comes from sources including stock market manipulation, property deals, vast bonuses from state-owned firms with a monopoly on the market, and even large wedding and other gifts to powerful officials and their relatives.

"Grey money is usually closely connected to the following: corruption, abuse of power, public investment, shares in land development (projects) and other monopoly interests," Wang told the Beijing Evening News.

The report predicted stronger government efforts to rebalance income, because of the negative impact of the yawning gap on both stability and economic growth.

"It is very likely that unlike normal capital return, grey income usually does not help improve competitiveness and efficiency," the report said.

"On the contrary, a large amount of it is likely to come from loss of enterprise and government income or usurpation and plunder of ordinary household income and property. This hampers justice, undermines economic efficiency and becomes a major factor for social conflict and instability." ($1=6.774 Yuan)


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## hkskyline

*China's urban population set to surpass rural figure*
4 July 2010

BEIJING, July 4 (Reuters) - China's urban population is to surpass its rural population for the first time by 2015, with the number of Chinese living in towns and cities set to top 700 million, Xinhua news agency reported.

Li Bin, director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said that the world's most populous country is projected to have 1.39 billion citizens by 2015, up from 1.32 billion at the end of 2008, Xinhua quoted her as saying.

The number of people over 60 would pass 200 million, the first boom in the old-age population, she said. An average of 8 million are expected to turn 60 each year, 3.2 million more than the average in 2006-2010.

The population dependency ratio, the proportion of those too young or old to work, would rise for the first time after falling for over 40 years, while the ratio of those aged 15-59 would peak and then slowly fall.


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## hkskyline

*Middle class dream fades for China white collar workers *
15 December 2010

SHANGHAI, Dec 15 (Reuters) - Shanghai native Wu Xiaodong has a solid job as a human resource supervisor in a technology company and earns around 4000 yuan ($600) a month. But he is still single at 28 and lives with his parents.

"At this age, things we would be looking at would be marriage and children," he said, adding that he is daunted by the costs of an apartment, a wedding, education for his future children and the price of medical care as his parents age.

A university degree has long been seen as a ticket away from poverty, but China's version of the "middle class dream" is fast fading as graduate job seekers are faced with the stark reality of high living costs, low wages and dim career prospects.

The competition for white collar jobs is heating up as companies in China's top-tier cities such as Shanghai look for talent among an ever-widening pool of more than 6 million graduate job seekers every year.

University education has been a key to China's aim to create a broad urban tier of middle class families with "well-off characteristics" nationwide. The country began expanding university enrollment in 1996 to meet growing personnel demands as China's economy boomed, leading to a surge of graduates.

But signs of economic trouble have put additional financial pressure on companies already struggling with the after effects of the global financial crisis, keeping wages tight.

China's inflation soared past forecasts to a 28-month high in November and showed signs of spreading beyond food prices, putting pressure on the government to tighten monetary policy.

A recent study by a top Chinese labour economist showed that China's university graduates on average earned only 300 yuan ($44) more than a blue collar migrant worker per month, setting off hot debate on the worth of a university education.

"During my father's generation, university education produced the elite," said 24-year-old Zhu Feng, a post-graduate student at a Shanghai job fair.

"But today, university graduates are everywhere, and there are also many people with masters and doctorates. So the worth of a degree is very much devalued."

As a result, thousands of university graduates crowd job fairs in Shanghai at every opportunity, hoping to find a starting point for their white collar career.

Job seekers do quick face-to-face interviews with recruiters before dropping off a resumes from a thick stack.

CITY LIGHTS

Since Chinese cities began booming in the 1990s and the workforce began to favour degree-holders over traditional state-run factory workers, people from poorer parts of China have migrated into cities for an education and then a job.

Top-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are now the favoured destinations for graduates.

But reality is biting hard into these dreams as the increasingly high cost of living in these big cities set in.

Rising property prices have been one of the key factors affecting the Chinese middle class, pushing away the chance of owning a home for many young couples.

With China's property sector crucial for the broader economy, authorities have been at pains to balance the needs of economic stability with those of ordinary citizens.

The growing ranks of white collar job seekers is posing a policy challenge for Beijing's Communist Party leaders and some experts have suggest the authorities should divert young professionals into second-tier cities such as Chengdu and Xiamen to take pressure off Beijing and Shanghai.

Cost pressures are a huge concern for out-of-town graduates, who live on the edge of poverty in China's biggest cities.

Known as the "ant tribe", a rising number of these struggling graduates are living in cheap and basic housing in the suburbs and travelling on crowded public transportation for more than an hour to reach their workplaces in the city centre.

22-year-old Li Hanli, a native of central Hunan province, shares a room with two other people at a dorm-like hotel in the city's suburbs.

Her clothes hang from the ceiling of her small windowless room, and internet and power cables line the floor in disarray.

Li has just started work at an internet software company as a sales executive earning 1500 yuan ($225) a month. She and others like her can only afford places like hers, which charge around 500 yuan ($75) a month.

Despite the difficulties, she is undaunted.

"With such a big market, it would definitely bring me more opportunities to develop myself. I also have my own dreams for my career. I believe I can reach the peak of my career in Shanghai."


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## General Huo

Cool night shot from NASA for Beijing-Tianjin metropolitan. Can we see one that that the two giant metropolises merge into one?


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## the spliff fairy

If they ever joined it would become the worlds biggest city?


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## Chrissib

When the Chinese will allow the citys to suburbanize, why not?


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## oliver999

Chrissib said:


> When the Chinese will allow the citys to suburbanize, why not?


since china choose highrise route,it's not likely developing huge surburb in future.


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## Chrissib

oliver999 said:


> since china choose highrise route,it's not likely developing huge surburb in future.


When Europe was as developed as China is now GDP-wise (around 1910) it also built lot's of appartement buildings. Now half of the population lives in single-family-housing. Suburbanisation and sprawl usually comes when people can afford cars. When the growth trend continues, this should be the case in 10 years. Then also the average Chinese can afford to have a car. Beijing shows that the Chinese love to buy cars. 

But i don't think that China will sprawl like the USA or Australia. The route for the first wave of urbanization is chosen. I think China's cities will develop more like in Europe, with a mixed outcome. At least in the north China has more space for it's cities to sprawl then Taiwan or Korea, which are very mountaneous nations.


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## siamu maharaj

General Huo said:


> Cool night shot from NASA for Beijing-Tianjin metropolitan. Can we see one that that the two giant metropolises merge into one?


Those small "towns" between Beijing and Tianjin would probably be mega cities in most other countries of the world!


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## NCT

Chrissib said:


> When Europe was as developed as China is now GDP-wise (around 1910) it also built lot's of appartement buildings. Now half of the population lives in single-family-housing. Suburbanisation and sprawl usually comes when people can afford cars. When the growth trend continues, this should be the case in 10 years. Then also the average Chinese can afford to have a car. Beijing shows that the Chinese love to buy cars.
> 
> But i don't think that China will sprawl like the USA or Australia. The route for the first wave of urbanization is chosen. I think China's cities will develop more like in Europe, with a mixed outcome. At least in the north China has more space for it's cities to sprawl then Taiwan or Korea, which are very mountaneous nations.


China cannot afford to have half its population in single family housing, as there would be no farmland, parks or playing fields left. What Beijing shows, is not only that the Chinese love to buy cars, but also that allowing such levels of car ownership and usage has proved a total disaster.


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## binhai

siamu maharaj said:


> Those small "towns" between Beijing and Tianjin would probably be mega cities in most other countries of the world!


nah, each one of those towns is only a million, not a mega city :lol:


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## Anderson Geimz

BarbaricManchurian said:


> nah, each one of those towns is only a million, not a mega city :lol:


Please enlighten us which towns in that picture exactely have a million people, because the largest ones I see are all 350,000-480,000.


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## Huhu

Anderson Geimz said:


> Please enlighten us which towns in that picture exactely have a million people, because the largest ones I see are all 350,000-480,000.


I think the one closer to Tianjin is actually part of Tianjin municipal district and has a population of around 800,000 or something like that.


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## fanlynne

By 2015, nearly 50 percent of the people in the country will live in cities and other urban areas, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD) said on Monday (March 29).


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## hkskyline

NCT said:


> China cannot afford to have half its population in single family housing, as there would be no farmland, parks or playing fields left. What Beijing shows, is not only that the Chinese love to buy cars, but also that allowing such levels of car ownership and usage has proved a total disaster.


Exactly. China's growing middle class must not adopt the American-style car-loving culture, or else the cities will all grind to a halt.


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## NCT

hkskyline said:


> Exactly. China's growing middle class must not adopt the American-style car-loving culture, or else the cities will all grind to a halt.


Though it is a bit worrying a lot of recent developments have been following the American model with large block-size low permeability grid-iron patterned roads with little street interaction.


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## chornedsnorkack

NCT said:


> China cannot afford to have half its population in single family housing, as there would be no farmland, parks or playing fields left.


China HAS well over half its population in single family housing, because most of the village houses ARE single family houses (apartment houses like the Hakka family complexes are exception not rule) - and they do leave most of the land as farmland.


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## fragel

Anderson Geimz said:


> Please enlighten us which towns in that picture exactely have a million people, because the largest ones I see are all 350,000-480,000.


Many 'towns'(light spots) are suburban districts of Beijing or Tianjin. But there is one major city Langfang between Beijing and Tianjin, which is in the exact middle of the picture, and it has about 4 million residents.


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## Anderson Geimz

fragel said:


> Many 'towns'(light spots) are suburban districts of Beijing or Tianjin. But there is one major city Langfang between Beijing and Tianjin, which is in the exact middle of the picture, and it has about 4 million residents.


"Langfang city" does not have 4 million residents. It's a prefecture with a couple of cities none of which exceed 500,000.


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## Chrissib

NCT said:


> China cannot afford to have half its population in single family housing, as there would be no farmland, parks or playing fields left. What Beijing shows, is not only that the Chinese love to buy cars, but also that allowing such levels of car ownership and usage has proved a total disaster.


WWhat about rowhomes? The Netherlands has exactly the same population density as the flat Chinese provinces, yet most of the dutch people live in rowhomes and there is plenty of farmland left. Malaysia also builds them. Indonesia also has a more single-famil-development until now, although Java has double the population density of Chinese lowlands. 
Apart from inner Shanghai, the Chinese cities doesn't seem that dense after all, if you compare them to Indian or some Middle Eastern cities.


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## Chrissib

hkskyline said:


> Exactly. China's growing middle class must not adopt the American-style car-loving culture, or else the cities will all grind to a halt.


I'm sure they'll never do that, you cannot take the USA as a benchmark for other countries, because in city building, they are an exception. 

But it's possible, if not sure, that China's cities will develop to cities that have a similar structure to european cities. A mix of public and private transport, appartements, rowhomes and detached housing as well as a dense motorway-network, which China is developing very well until now.


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## fragel

Anderson Geimz said:


> "Langfang city" does not have 4 million residents. It's a prefecture with a couple of cities none of which exceed 500,000.


Under Langfang there are county-level cities or counties but not cities, and most importantly they belong to Langfang. When we talk about Beijing population, we don't break it down and claim Daxing is not part of Beijing.


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## hkskyline

Chrissib said:


> I'm sure they'll never do that, you cannot take the USA as a benchmark for other countries, because in city building, they are an exception.
> 
> But it's possible, if not sure, that China's cities will develop to cities that have a similar structure to european cities. A mix of public and private transport, appartements, rowhomes and detached housing as well as a dense motorway-network, which China is developing very well until now.


Err .. not really. I've seen some examples of American-style sprawl, and people are now getting richer and want Western-type lifestyles, with single family homes and 2 cars. It's a very dangerous trend.


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## Chrissib

hkskyline said:


> Err .. not really. I've seen some examples of American-style sprawl, and people are now getting richer and want Western-type lifestyles, with single family homes and 2 cars. It's a very dangerous trend.


Yes, there may be some examples, but they are still few. In the USA, the majority of the population lives in such suburbs. That's because of the low population density of the USA in general, which makes land cheap. In China, land is more expensive, like in Europe. So, like the Europeans, the middle-class Chinese of the future may live in a rowhome or a small detached house. The majority will still live in appartements. But I don't see this as a dangerous trend. The rising demand in China for car fuel will force the car-industry to invent more efficient cars, which will in turn also be sold in Europe or USA.


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## NCT

fragel said:


> Under Langfang there are county-level cities or counties but not cities, and most importantly they belong to Langfang. When we talk about Beijing population, we don't break it down and claim Daxing is not part of Beijing.


The administrative figures are meaningless without consideration of underlying geographical characteristics. Those county towns are geographically isolated from Langfang and the economies are not integrated, so it's far more appropriate to talk about physical sizes.



Chrissib said:


> WWhat about rowhomes? The Netherlands has exactly the same population density as the flat Chinese provinces, yet most of the dutch people live in rowhomes and there is plenty of farmland left. Malaysia also builds them. Indonesia also has a more single-famil-development until now, although Java has double the population density of Chinese lowlands.
> Apart from inner Shanghai, the Chinese cities doesn't seem that dense after all, if you compare them to Indian or some Middle Eastern cities.


You raise an interesting point. I guess when there's a perfect planning policy and no bubbles it is possible for a sizable proportion of the population to live in compact town houses with plot sizes of around 6m x 25m.

The problem I think is that as urbanisation is occuring at such a pace villages are not getting fewer or smaller, so the physical size of the built environment is still getting larger. And the housing bubble means more homes are being built than necessary as people hoard housing as a form of investment, adding further to land inefficiency, so what's theoretically possible has an infinitely long way to become reality.


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## fragel

NCT said:


> The administrative figures are meaningless without consideration of underlying geographical characteristics. Those county towns are geographically isolated from Langfang and the economies are not integrated, so it's far more appropriate to talk about physical sizes.


The thing is, there is no city called Langfang if you throw away all the counties. Langfang itself is defined as the collection of the districts and counties. Unlike Suzhou, when you exclude its county level cities such as Kunshan, you'll still have the core city of Suzhou. This does not apply to Langfang. Langfang is more like Beijing or Shanghai, Langfang's county level cities are just like Daxing or Jinshan.


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## NCT

fragel said:


> The thing is, there is no city called Langfang if you throw away all the counties. Langfang itself is defined as the collection of the districts and counties. Unlike Suzhou, when you exclude its county level cities such as Kunshan, you'll still have the core city of Suzhou. This does not apply to Langfang. Langfang is more like Beijing or Shanghai, Langfang's county level cities are just like Daxing or Jinshan.


But there IS the core city of Langfang, just not very big, roughly the areas of Anci and Guangyang districts.


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## Chrissib

NCT said:


> You raise an interesting point. I guess when there's a perfect planning policy and no bubbles it is possible for a sizable proportion of the population to live in compact town houses with plot sizes of around 6m x 25m.
> 
> The problem I think is that as urbanisation is occuring at such a pace villages are not getting fewer or smaller, so the physical size of the built environment is still getting larger. And the housing bubble means more homes are being built than necessary as people hoard housing as a form of investment, adding further to land inefficiency, so what's theoretically possible has an infinitely long way to become reality.


OK, let's do the math. If you have on average households with the size of 2.5 people, and if you assume that half of a given area are the houses and the other half is shops, business, roads and greenery, you got an average density of roughly over 8,000 people/km². That's four times the density of US-suburbs and double the density of British or German suburbs. So, if China is going to suburbanize in that pattern, you still have more open space left than there is in England. These would be suitable family-friendly homes for the middle-class. 
Malaysia roughly has that pattern of houses, they look very well planned. Take a look in Google Earth and see how the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur are.

In the next 10-20 years China will move to the pattern that rural areas are shrinking faster, because the Cities keep on growing but the overall population is going to peak in 20 years. But experience in the developed countries show that there will be no reduction of built-up space in the countryside. The houses will still be occupied by older people. Also the factories will start to move from the cities to the countryside. Farms will be converted to normal houses, because farming gives you less and less money compared to other activities. Farm sizes will grow. 


I think the housing bubble won't be a problem for China. Afaik cities are still growing fast and appartement-sizes are still much smaller compared to developed countries. There are still many people who live in very crowded rooms provided by the factories. There is still the Hukou system preventing more people from flocking into the cities. This could be liberalized. There are still plenty of opportunities left for China to solve the housing bubble.


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## Suburbanist

endrity said:


> Most, not all, americans do to because they were born with it. However most people don't, they like to have a car, and use a car, but they don't want a life build around it.


Why single out the car as something not to build a life around it? We already build our lives around amenities like electricity, telecommunications, vaccination, refrigerators etc.


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## NCT

Chrissib said:


> At worst, the traffic of Beijing could double over the next 30 years, because Beijing already has half the amount of cars per 1000 people from that in the developed countries. Maybe even more, because car ownership in cities is usually lower than in the countryside. When more and more people of Beijing move to the suburbs, this will reduce the population density of the city core and so traffic will be reduced. Traffic is always a function of population density, car ownership rate and km's driven per car.
> 
> What I see as a problem in Beijing is that the road network is too much focused on the main roads. The highrise-developments are usually cul-de-sac-developments, so even for short trips the people are forced to drive on the main roads. There should be more small streets between the highrises, traffic calmed of course. This could move away short-distance-traffic from the main roads.


Beijing is already like a doughnut with suburban density higher than central density. Also a more spread out city will do nothing to ease congestion as traffic is determined by business concentration which will only grow. No matter how spread out residential areas are everybody will go to the same CBDs, so any approaches based on lower densities and more roads are a big no-no.

You are right in pointing out the problem of low permeability of the road network. The obstacle is government departments and agencies, as well as residences of high party officials, which don't like permeability and are practically untouchable.


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## NCT

Suburbanist said:


> Why single out the car as something not to build a life around it? We already build our lives around amenities like electricity, telecommunications, vaccination, refrigerators etc.


Resource scarcity? Welfare maximisation? Rationality? How can you maximise welfare when everyone insists on chasing scare recourses and using them inefficiently? Surely these are not alien concepts to an, albeit self-acclaimed, economist?


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## Suburbanist

NCT said:


> Resource scarcity? Welfare maximisation? Rationality? How can you maximise welfare when everyone insists on chasing scare recourses and using them inefficiently? Surely these are not alien concepts to an, albeit self-acclaimed, economist?


I do not question the concepts, but the way you interpret them. Driving utility is not necessarily only getting person X from A to B. If person X wants to drive, affordable fuels, wide roads and cheap car loans are maximizing his/her welfare.

Welfare maximization is done via money allocations. If oil gets to $600/barrel, only the affluent will be able to drive on a daily basis, and air trips would suffer a severe reductions, maybe elimination of short-haul flights. Yet, pharmaceutical industry would not stop making pills and medical devices like stents or pacemakers. Likewise, we would probably see a massive drop on plastic wrapping and packaging in favor or paper-based alternatives in combination with less packaging everywhere (no more triple packaging on a 20ml perfume).


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## NCT

Suburbanist said:


> I do not question the concepts, but the way you interpret them. Driving utility is not necessarily only getting person X from A to B. If person X wants to drive, affordable fuels, wide roads and cheap car loans are maximizing his/her welfare.


Well I'd say getting from A to B in a timely, convenient and safe manner constitutes probably 80-90% of most people's journey utility, with the remaining being comfort. The desire to drive, or on wide roads, ceteris paribus, only exists in very few people, like the poster I'm quoting ...


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## Sniper

Suburbanist said:


> Why single out the car as something not to build a life around it? We already build our lives around amenities like electricity, telecommunications, vaccination, refrigerators etc.


You just cannot compare the car usage to electricity, refrigeration or vaccination, or even communications, since they're essential nowadays (people may not have a car and enjoy a perfect life), and I don't see too many debates actually trying to _replace_ them. 

Indeed we built our lives around _*transportation*_, and in this range there are several alternatives. The car's just one of them.


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## pesto

I think most people build their lives around their family, their work and their interests. I have selected where to live (urban and suburban) based on school quality, employment opportunites, weather, where I have friends and relatives, cost of housing, etc. Transit is not even on the list, since I assume I can have a car and get myself to bus or rail if needed. 

Ditto for electricity, etc. Not on the list. Maybe this is the sign of a developed economy. You don't even think about infrastructure, whether it's the power grid, good roads or good transit, it's just a given.


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## xerxesjc28

We (in the USA) build our lives around cars, but DO NOT get the impression we absolutely need/want cars. Some of the most popular areas to hang out for most Americans are places that resemble the pedestrian/urbanity of Europe. Take for instance Lincoln Road (a pedestrian mall) in Miami Beach, heck even indoors malls to some degree.Boston,New York, San Francisco also have great examples of these places. People love going to those places because they want that feeling that is found in Europe for instance.


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## hkskyline

But those spaces account for a miniscule percentage compared to the rest of American suburbia, with big box stores, their huge park lots, and drive-thrus.


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## xerxesjc28

^^ Yes, that is sorta my point. Those places account for a small rarely seen part by most Americans. Yet they love places like that when they go there, they (us or we) take trips/vacations to places like those (Miami Beach) to experience it because they love it.


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## the spliff fairy

I heard some city authorities pedestrianised places, only to retarmac it again after all the business went down.


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## xerxesjc28

^^ yes that has happned in some places due to bad urban planning. There are many examples of this, but there are also many examples where it did work out right. Many times urban spaces are just plopped down in some random location with bad acces or bad shading or to far from places to go and do stuff and they get used very little if at all.


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## hkskyline

*On the menu in China: Middle class bounty, but lean times for urban poor *
12 May 2011

BEIJING (AP) - Hunger was such a constant companion in Yao Qizhong's childhood that even now, at age 40, he'll stoop down to salvage a single clove of garlic that falls from his table at the Beijing market where he hawks fresh produce.

Life is less harsh these days, but China's fast-rising food prices have hit his family hard, making it increasingly difficult to save for his three kids' education -- Yao's main goal.

Across town, Zhong Sheng rinses a still-twitching Mandarin fish and picks the stems from a handful of greens as he expounds on his philosophy of grocery shopping. Health and safety are his top concerns, ever since the architect became a father five years ago. Cost is a secondary consideration.

"You can buy cheap stuff," says Zhong as he and his wife cooked together and the smells of soy and scallion filled their cozy kitchen, "but if it makes you sick, you're going to end up paying more anyway in hospital fees."

The starkly contrasting fortunes of the Zhong and Yao families offer a glimpse into how soaring food prices are playing out in the developing world -- home to more than three quarters of the globe's 6.9 billion people.

Prosperity and a fast-growing middle class have cultivated more sophisticated and exotic tastes. Such luxuries as blueberries, avocado, asparagus, and endive, recently unattainable to all but the wealthiest, are now widely available in China's big cities.

But rising affluence has taxed the ability of farmers to meet growing demand while the rural labor pool dwindles. The result: Rising food prices hit every level of society, not just those who can afford imported South American bananas or pricey mushrooms and herbs from China's remote Yunnan province. People on low or fixed incomes feel the pinch most.

"We don't dare to try and eat good stuff because we can't afford it," says Yao, whose four grandparents starved to death during China's 1960 famine. He was so poor growing up in rural Anhui province that his neighbors assumed he would end up a beggar on the streets.

"If I go to a supermarket," he says, "it's a novelty, like sightseeing."

In China, farm workers have flocked by the millions to factory and service jobs in coastal cities. Luring them back to till and weed by hand is proving a tough sell. The resulting supply pinch helped send food prices up 11.5 percent in April from the year before, adding to months of steep increases.

"You can't find (farm) workers and they're expensive, over a dollar (7 yuan) an hour," said Liu Li, a wholesaler hawking Napa cabbage and coriander at Beijing's Xinfadi, north China's biggest agricultural distribution center.

People in the countryside want factory work or a job in the service industry, where they'd get to stay indoors and have a warm place to sleep, said Liu. Farm work, she said, is "too dirty and too hard."

Even with sharply higher food prices, Zhong, who runs his own business and has a master's degree from a prestigious Beijing university, can afford to be picky. Besides he sees good reason to favor more expensive organically grown and imported foods after infant formula tainted with an industrial chemical killed six children and sickened 300,000 in China in 2008.

Zhong, his wife and daughter sit down to a typical dinner of steamed fish, two types of greens, mushrooms, pork, rice and sliced apples. Total cost, about 80 yuan ($12). Each month the family spends some 2,000 yuan ($307) on food -- about 10 percent of their income.

Yao, who left the countryside more than two decades ago, still eats like a peasant, filling up on cheap steamed buns and noodles and pinching every penny so that he can put his kids through school. For him, meat is a once-a-week treat, though he tries to make sure his children eat it more often.

As a migrant laborer, Yao has been able to skirt China's strict birth limits, having three kids instead of the two most rural families are limited to. But his migrant status means he must pay school fees himself.

A recent and routine lunch for Yao and his wife and children was a bowl of simple noodles with greens. Yao's ginger and garlic stall earns him about 2,000 yuan ($307) a month, of which about 600 yuan ($92) goes on food for his five-person family.

"I need to save money but I feel like I am already scraping the bottom of the barrel," he said. "At the same time, I know we have to feed ourselves and eat enough, otherwise our health is going to be affected."

A host of other factors are also blamed for food prices hikes in China and elsewhere in Asia, including too much money sloshing about the economy after stimulus policies that warded off the global recession, rising oil prices and shrinking land for cultivation because of pollution and encroachment by industry.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Office's index of global prices for meat, cereals and dairy foods has surged 37 percent in the first three months of 2011. In many Asian countries, that has translated into a 10 percent increase in local food prices, which the Asian Development Bank estimates is enough to drag another 64 million people below the $1.25 a day poverty line.

Yet the changes in food and work preferences aren't all bad because they reflect the human and economic development taking place in China, said Scott Rozelle, an agricultural economist at Stanford University and an expert on China's food markets.

Rozelle says that China's scattered and small scale farms are becoming more consolidated and mechanized, which could eventualy raise productivity, but the changes probably won't stop food prices from rising. Economic development involves both increases in prices and incomes, he says.

Higher food prices have in fact lifted lagging rural incomes. The per capita net income for rural Chinese grew faster than urban incomes last year, jumping 10 percent to 5,919 yuan ($902).

Rural Chinese are "going from grinding poor to poor," said Rozelle, describing villages he's seen with new brick homes and gravel roads, where all the girls go to school and every family has a mobile phone.

But the changes feel painful for many urban dwellers, particularly retirees, civil servants and migrants, like Yao, whose incomes haven't kept pace. And the discontent that a widening gap between privileged and poor can generate deeply worries China's communist leaders, who are mindful that the anti-government protests that toppled Egypt's government earlier this year were triggered in part by discontent over climbing food costs.

Yao says he envies people who can eat what they like without concern for cost, but tries not to dwell on it.

"Yes, it's unfair," he said. "But I know I just have to keep going. I have to work hard and it will get better."

Even those benefiting from China's rising prosperity such as Zhong, the Beijing architect, are concerned.

"Their incomes are not rising as fast so for them this is difficult," he said. "I think the government needs to find a way to help them raise that sector's incomes too, and take care of them."


----------



## big-dog

*Urban population to exceed rural population*

Updated: 2011-12-20 06:41

(Xinhua)



> BEIJING - *A government-backed blue book unveiled Monday estimated that the country's urban population will outnumber the rural population by the end of 2011 at the current speed of urbanization.*
> 
> According to China's latest nationwide census that wrapped up in 2010, China's urban population accounted for 49.68 percent of the total population.
> 
> "If the rural population really outnumbers the urban population, it will be a significant breaking point for China in changing its thousand-year-old farmer-dominated population structure," the blue book said.
> 
> It will not only mean a simple alteration in the percentage figure of the urban population, but will also mean profound changes in people's lifestyles, employment, consumption and even values, it said.
> 
> The blue book said China's millions of migrant workers had acquired increasing income growth, but more than 60 percent of them lived separately from their family members.
> 
> With a rapid rate of urbanization since China adopted an opening-up and reform policy at the end of the 1970s, millions of farmers left their rural homes to find seasonal jobs in the construction and service industries.
> 
> Estimates put the country's number of migrant workers at over 240 million people, a number roughly equal to the entire US population.
> 
> Compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), the book said that about 40 percent of migrant workers had chosen to relocate their families to urban areas, while 60 percent left either their spouse or children in rural homes.
> 
> "Even migrant workers who have settled family members in urban areas may live in different cities than their families," said Li Wei, a researcher with the Institute of Sociology of the CASS.
> 
> Meanwhile, Chinese farmers who have not left rural areas are also seeing increasing incomes.
> 
> The book said that urban residents' disposable income per capita was 16,301 yuan (2,574 US dollars) in the first three quarters of 2011, marking a 7.8 percent jump compared with that of 2010.
> 
> Rural residents' cash income per capita during the period was 5,878 yuan, marking a 13.6 percent increase that has outpaced the income increases for urban residents.


source


----------



## megacity30

*Abolish Hukou*



Huhu said:


> Are you suggesting that people still be discouraged from trying to obtain a "big city hukou" as they are currently, and only half-reforming the hukou system to make smaller cities more appealing?


why not just abolish the regressive Hukou system altogether; treat all Chinese people as equal citizens and allow cities to flourish.

http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=151&catid=11&subcatid=72


URBAN LIFE IN CHINA

According to the 2010 census, 49.7 percent of China’s population lives in urban areas. This is up from 36.1 percent in the 2000 census, which used a different counting system, Urban population in 2007 was estimated to be 44 percent, compared to 90 percent in Great Britain and 13 percent in Ethiopia. . 

The percentage of people living in urban areas is expected to rise from around 40 percent today to 60 percent by 2030. Already around 20 million Chinese move to the cities every year and that figure could rise. 

The urban population of China has risen from 18 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 1990 to 36 percent in 2001 to 44 percent in 2007. China's urban population will overtake its rural population for the first time by 2015, with the number of people living in towns and cities set to top 700 million, state media reported in July 2010. It is expected to rise above 60 percent in 2030. When the Deng economic reforms were launched in 1978 there 172 million urban residents. In 2008 there were 577 million. 

An additional 300 million to 400 million people—more than the entire population of the United States— are expected to move from the countryside to the city over the next 30 years, according to China’s Development Research Center, causing the China's population urban to rise from 47 percent to 75 percent. With consumption levels and wages three times higher in the city than in the countryside, this will put an enormous strain on energy and water resources  unless there is a change in the urbanization model. 

Urban populations are fragmented into urban residents and migrant workers, those who work for the private sector, those who for state enterprises, the political elite, a small emerging middle class and the disenfranchised masses. 

The average income of urban dwellers nearly doubled between 2001 and 2005. Monthly income in Guangzhou in 2010 was $164, four times what it was in 1993. City people are also becoming more educated. By contrast in rural areas, incomes have remained stagnant and schools have gotten worse and more expensive. 

The demographic trends in Shanghai are similar to those of other Chinese cities. Eight million of Shanghai's 13 million people live in the downtown area, twice as many as in 1949. The government has helped build over a million new housing units and helped workers set up saving plans to afford them. 

Most major towns and villages are located on harbors, rivers, major roads or transportation hubs. Towns have traditionally sprung up where different agriculture districts met and markets sprung up to allow people to trade goods. Over time the market became large enough to support a permanent population of merchants and craftsmen 

The look of small towns and villages reflects the peculiarities of the environment, building skills and technology, and available materials. Forms and shapes are determined by traditions and necessity rather than a sense of taste or aesthetics. The architect Norman F. Carver Jr. wrote: villages and towns do “not aim for an artificial impressiveness or follow an alien pattern of pretentious buildings and monumental spaces. Their impressiveness lay in the rhythmic repetition of a single house type, compact and dense, arranged to reflect the social realities of small town life." 

Cities and towns in China traditionally have had a south-facing rectangle wall surrounding a grid of public buildings and courtyard houses with similar symmetrical layouts. Many modern towns are centered around a government compound with an ugly modernist sculpture out front, accompanied by Communist slogans that are supposed to generate and image of modernity. 

Chinese addresses are sometimes hard to figure out. Chinese often identify places by nearness to a landmark rather than a street number. 

There are 669 cities in China. More than 100 (60 or 200 depending on the source) of them have a population of more than 1 million. In the United States there are only nine cities with a population of more than 1 million. In China there were less than 50 in 1989.Many have gone from being Third World backwaters with outdoor markets and roads dominated by bicycles to modern cities with skyscrapers, shopping malls and traffic jams in record time. 

A typical city was established where livestock from the dry plains was traded with grain grown on irrigated plains and produce and fruit was grown on coastal areas and in mountains. As it the matured the city became surrounded by agricultural districts that produced large surpluses that could support a large population of craftsmen and merchants. 

Most Chinese cities are ugly, and people complain they all look alike and have very little to offer. Many are dominated by blocky cement buildings, crumbling apartments, dilapidated factories and pollution-belching smokestacks. Exposed power lines are piled on top of one another. The air is chocked with dust and dirt from construction projects. 

China has a makeshift impermanence to it. Zoning rules and centralized planning seems non-existent. There are few parks, and typically they have few trees and look filthy and run down. Sidewalks start and stop, stairways are steep, buildings are often thrown up in a very haphazard manner, and beauty parlors and shops are often found in houses in residential districts. 

A typical Chinese city has wide roads, cycle lanes, several universities, a number of technical institutes, hospitals and a medical school. Even mid-size cities have several million people, a skyline, an airport expressway, a large wall-off industrial zone and fancy condominiums. 

A typical city such as Changzhu had 700,000 residents in 1996 and 4 million in 2006 The number of towns is expected to grow in the next 15 years from 50,000 to 70,000. 

Lazhou—a city once regarded as the gateway to the Silk Road—is now one of China’s dirtiest cities. It was described in a New Yorker article as “an assemblage pf rusting machinery, slag heaps, and landfills; of chimneys, brick kilns, and belching thick smoke; of concrete tenements whose broken windows are held together with cellophane and old newspapers.” 

The urban population of China is expected to rise to 80 percent or 90 percent of the entire population in coming decades. George Yeo, Singapore’s foreign minister, wrote in Global Viewpoint, ‘China is urbanizing at a speed and scale never seen before in human history...Recognizing the need to conserve land and energy, the Chinese are now embarked on a stupendous effort to build megacities, each accommodating tens of millions of people, each with the population of a small country. And these will not be urban conurbations like Mexico City or Lagos growing higgledy-piggledly but cities’ with planned urban infrastructure. 

The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that at least 15 megacities with 25 million residents–each with the population of a major country—and 11 city-clusters, each with a combined population of more than 60 million—will come into existence. Because so much land is owned by the state the Chinese government will be able determine how these cities will be shaped with industrial parks, high-speed trains and areas of skyscrapers. 


Urban Mentality in China

Describing how the mentality of urban areas, a newspaper editor told the Atlantic Monthly: “In the city the old village ties are left behind. Everyone lives close together. The state is part of everyone’s life. They work at jobs and buy their food and clothing at markets and in stores. There are laws, police, courts, and schools. People in the city lose their fear of outsiders, and take an interest in foreign things.” 

“Life in the city depends on cooperation, in sophisticated social networks. Mutual self-interest defines public policy. You can’t get anything done without cooperating with others, so politics in the city becomes the art of compromise and partnership. The highest goal of politics becomes cooperation, community, and keeping peace. By definition, politics in the city becomes nonviolent. The backbone of urban politics isn’t blood, it’s law.” 


Urban Benefits and Social Unrest in China

Urban dwellers receive more benefits and socials services than rural people. Nearly all get health insurance through their companies or the government. Over 60 percent of the elderly people in the big cities receive a pension, compared to six percent in rural areas. City schools are better and have lower fees than rural schools. 

The government provides more generous social services to urban areas than to the countryside in part because it fears urban social unrest, which can become organized, spread and gain momentum and present a real threat to the government. By contrast rural unrest tends to be fragmented, scattered and easier to contain once its gets started. 


The Hukou System, China’s All-Important Residency Cards 

All Chinese citizens need a carry hukou (residency card) to live in a city named on the card or move from one place to another. A kind of internal passport, the hukou system was implemented in 1958 to halt migration, control grain rations, and keep tabs on the masses and give rural people a connection to their land. Modern ones are imbedded with chips that have person’s name and place of birth . 

A residency card is one of the most valuable documents in China. It is necessary to get an apartment and job in a town or city and send children to school. There are many stories of husbands and wives that are separated because the husband got a good job in a distance town and his wife couldn't secure a new hukou. Peasants migrate to cities without hukous in search of jobs and have trouble getting decent housing and places for their kids in school. 

Keith B. Richburg wrote in the Washington Post, “One of China's oldest tools of population control, the hukou is essentially a household registration permit, akin to an internal passport. It contains all of a household's identifying information, such as parents' names, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, moves and colleges attended. Most important, it identifies the city, town or village to which a person belongs.” [Source: Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, August 15, 2010] 

“The hukou dates back at least 2,000 years, when the Han dynasty used it as a way to collect taxes and determine who served in the army. Mao Zedong's Communist regime revived it in 1958 to keep poor rural farmers from flooding into the cities. It remains a key tool for keeping track of people and monitoring those the government considers ‘troublemakers.’" [Ibid] 

The government is afraid is to get rid of internal passports out of fear they such a move would encourage more rural people to migrate to the cities which are already overextended and busting at the seams. The inability of the government to keep track of all the migrants has made it easier for criminals and dissidents to hide from authorities, and, the government worries, for migrants to organize political protest without the police knowing about it. 


Hardships and Discrimination Under the Hukou System 

Under the hukou system migrant workers, who in many ways fuel the booing Chinese economy, cannot get urban ID cards. “Critics say the hukou system perpetuates China's growing urban-rural divide, “ Keith B. Richburg wrote in the Washington Post. “Migrant workers flock to the coastal cities to labor in factories and take other manual jobs, sometimes living many years in places such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Because they lack an "urban hukou," they are forever designated "temporary residents" — unentitled to subsidized public housing, public education beyond elementary school, public medical insurance and government welfare payments.” [Source: Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, August 15, 2010] 

“People who live in a city such as Beijing but do not have a local hukou must travel to their home towns to get a marriage license, apply for a passport or take the national university entrance exam. Parents and students say the last requirement is particularly onerous, especially if a student has to take the exam in a province that uses different textbooks.” 

Some economists here say the hukou system is outdated and unsuited to a modern economy that requires the free movement of labor. Others call it "China's apartheid," saying it has created a two-tiered system of haves and have-nots in all the major cities. "You have a large number of rural migrants who already earn most of their income in the cities, who have been in the cities a long time, but do not have hukou-related benefits," Tao Ran, an economist at Renmin University told the Washington Post. "This system is very bad; it's ridiculous." 


People Discriminated Against Under the Hukou System 

Keith B. Richburg wrote in the Washington Post, “Wang Aijun is the editor of the Beijing News, one of China's most influential private daily newspapers. Yet here in the capital, Wang said, he often feels like a second-class citizen. He pays Beijing taxes, but his teenage son is not allowed to attend a Beijing public high school. To install a telephone or an Internet line, he must pay in advance. He is charged more for a ticket to some city parks. He doesn't qualify for a subsidized apartment. He cannot enroll his family in the city's public health-insurance program. The reason for the discrimination? Despite having lived and worked in Beijing for seven years, Wang still does not have that most sought-after of commodities: a Beijing "hukou." [Source: Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, August 15, 2010] 

Wang, 42, moved to Beijing seven years ago from Zhengzhou, in Henan province, after he became editor of the Beijing News. The paper could not get him a Beijing hukou, but he took the job anyway. "I thought I should do something I was interested in," Wang said. "I also thought China's hukou system would be reformed in six or seven years." [Ibid] 

Wamg estimates that nearly a third of Beijing's 22 million-plus people do not have a Beijing hukou —including, he said, most members of his newspaper staff. Some reports put the number of temporary residents in the capital at 8 million. "I've gotten used to living in Beijing without a hukou," Wang said. "A hukou is like the air — you don't think about it normally. But once you need it and don't have it, you get pretty upset." Wang cited the fees he must pay for his 15-year-old son's expensive international school. [Ibid] 


People Desperate to Get a Beijing Hukou 

The Beijing hukou is the most prized, if only because it is the hardest to get,” Richburg wrote. “One reason is education: The capital has the country's most highly regarded universities, and those schools reserve a large quota of places for Beijing hukou-holders. Chinese from outside the city can switch to a Beijing hukou by joining the civil service, getting a job with a state-owned company or achieving a high military rank. [Source: Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, August 15, 2010] 

Some get desperate, taking a job they don't really want if it offers them a hukou. Peng Li, 29, graduated with a law degree from a Beijing university in 2008 and was offered work in a company's legal office. But the offer did not include a guaranteed Beijing hukou, so she took a job as an official in a Beijing suburb. "This job is kind of boring, and the salary is not high," she said. "I regarded it as a springboard to getting a Beijing hukou." [Ibid] 

Some young people seeking a spouse on popular Internet sites will state upfront that they prefer a partner who has a Beijing hukou. "Girl, 26, from North China, 161 cm tall . . . looking for a guy who was born between 1976 and 1983 and wants to marry within three years," says one posting on a popular site by a girl calling herself "imzly." "I hope you . . . have a Beijing hukou (because I don't have one)." [Ibid] 


Relaxing and Reforming the Hukou System 

Andrew Jacobs wrote in the New York Times Policy makers have been discussing hukou reform for two decades, but beyond limited experiments in Shanghai, Chongqing, Chengdu and a smattering of second-tier cities, the National People’s Congress, China’s lawmaking body, has declined to act. Resistance comes from factory owners who want migrant laborers to remain insecure and cheap to exploit, and from urban elites who fear an even greater deluge of migrants from the countryside if it becomes easier to live in the city. But the most formidable opposition may be that of local governments, which worry about paying for the health care, education and other benefits that migrants and their children would qualify for as legal residents. [Source: Andrew Jacobs, New York Times August 29, 2011] 

In 2010, 15 Chinese newspapers ran a joint editorial calling on Beijing to immediately scrap the "inhumane" hukou system. Some have speculated that China’s labor shortage might embolden migrant to demand a speedier end to the hukou system, which violates the Chinese Constitution. 

In 2007, the Chinese government began issuing residency cards to the 150 million people that had moved to the cities but had not yet acquired residency. The aim was aimed at addressing crime and gaining better control over China’s floating population of migrants. 

Keith B. Richburg wrote in the Washington Post, “In the 1990s, some cities, including Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, began allowing people to acquire a local hukou if they bought property in the city or invested a large sum of money. Shanghai further relaxed the rules last year so that professionals who have lived in the city for seven years as tax-paying temporary residents could qualify....The Beijing government has taken several small steps toward hukou reform over the years. A Beijing pension can now be transferred to another city, for example, and the city's public kindergartens and grade schools were recently opened to all students, regardless of hukou status.” 

Some critics advocating an overhaul of the hukou system —or abolishing it altogether — said changes must be gradual to avoid large-scale disruption. Some have recommended assigning hukous by income or giving priority to those who have paid taxes in a city. Whatever the pace of change, experts said, the hukou has outlived its usefulness. "Migration is inevitable," said Tao of Renmin University. "We're proposing the government should just open all the cities." 

Many government officials worry that throwing out the hukou regime could lead to more overcrowding in already very populous cities ranging from Beijing and Tianjin to Shanghai and Shenzhen. Pleading that their health, education and social-welfare facilities are stretched to the limit, cadres have vigorously opposed allowing more migrant workers to settle in the east. [Source: Willy Lam, China Brief, March 10, 2011] 


Urban Growth in China

Shanghai neighborhood China is arguably experiencing the most rapid period of urbanization in the history of mankind. Around 300 million people are expected to migrate to the cities between 2005 and 2020. Already hundreds of millions have moved to the cities, the majority as migrant workers (See separate section). Between 1980 and 2005 the percentage of Chinese living in cities doubled. to more than 40 percent. An equivalent migration took place in the United States in the 19th century but it took place over a period that was twice as long—50 years—and involved a few million people rather than hundreds of millions of them. 

The amount of living space per person in Shanghai has grown from 8 to 16 square meters between 1990 and 2008. This means that not only are the cities growing at an amazing pace in term of numbers these numbers are also growing in terms of the space per person needed. 

Even so with this massive urbanization, China has relatively small percentage its population living in urban areas for an industrialized country. The low figure is due in part to past government policies which discouraged migration to cities. The majority of the new urban residents in the cities are migrant workers rather than permanent residents because permanent residents need a residency permit and these are hard to get. 

If China reaches a point it has the same percentage of urbanites as the United States (80 percent) then more a 1 billion people would be living in its cities. 

The Dutch architect Neville Mars told The New Yorker, “In China, bigness has become the only tool to keep pace with the fast developments. The European model of urbanization is outdated, and China proves that...The Chinese appear to be in control, but it’s really moving too fast for anyone.” 

Ningpo is a city 100 miles south of Shanghai that experienced an extraordinary spurt of growth of 14 percent a year over the past decade. Jonathan Franzen wrote in The New Yorker, “It seemed to me every inch of greater Ningpo was under construction or reconstruction simultaneously. My extremely new hotel had been built in the rear yard of a merely very new hotel, a few feet away. The roads were modern but heavily divoted, as if it were understood that they would all be torn up again soon anyway. The growth rate that Ningpo had sustained...quickly became exhausting just to look at it.” 

Hutongs in Beijing 

19th century Beijing Hutongs are the mazelike, old neighborhoods in Beijing made up of traditional quadrangle courtyard homes lined up along on narrow streets and alleys and often built in accordance with the principals of feng shui. In the pre-Mao-era, many residences were occupied by single extended family units and had spacious open air courtyards. But after Communists came to power the houses were divided and occupied by several families and the courtyards were filled with shanties. In many cases a house occupied by one family was occupies six or seven. The term "hutong" is derived from the Mongolian term for a passageway between yurts (tents). It refers to both the traditional winding lanes and the traditional old city neighborhoods. 

Hutongs are comprised mostly of alleys with no names that often twist and turn with no apparent rhyme or reason. They are fun to get lost in but near impossible to find anything in. The houses lie mostly behind gray brick walls and are unified into neighborhoods by public toilets and entranceways that people share. Heating is often provided by smoky coal fires that occasionally asphyxiate house occupants. Public toilets and showers are sometimes hundreds of meters away from where individuals live. 

During the day old men sell vegetables; children study on desks outside their homes; small time cobblers and fruit vendors go about their business; and beauty parlors and massage parlors welcome customers into old collapsing courtyard homes. In the evening many residents gather in the alleys to eat dinner or play. Even in the middle of winter friends gather to chat in the streets and street vendors make their rounds. 

Many of the alleys are too narrow for cars and the commercial buildings are too small for anything larger than family-owned shops. Next to small parks or standing alone are exercise stations with bars and pendulums and hoops and things like that, where older people like to gather and hang out and occasionally do a couple of exercises. In the morning residents scamper with their chamber pots to the public toilets. Vendors arrive mid morning with their three-wheeled carts, each crying the product or service the are selling: toilet paper, coal, recycling or knife-sharpening 

Hutong History

Hutong refers to both the traditional winding lanes and traditional old city neighborhoods. The term hutong, according to one source, is derived from the Mongolian term for a passageway between yurts (tents). According to another source it is derived from the Mongolian word hottoh (“water well”). In any case the word came into being in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), when China was absorbed into the Mongol Empire. Most of Beijing remaining hutongs date to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). 

The hutongs districts remained largely untouched in the the early years of Communist rule in the 1950s. At that time the wealthy hutong neighborhoods were mostly in northern Beijing and the poorer ones were in south of the Forbidden City. Starting in the 1960s as Beijing’s population grew housing shortages developed and several families began squeezing into courtyard houses meant for one family. Short of space the courtyards were filled with kitchens and sheds. Once open spaces became warrens of rooms, in the process of transforming many hutongs in slums that were avoided by middle class Chinese who lived in government housing.. 


Hutongs and Development

Torn down neighborhood In recent years many hutongs have been torn down to make way for concrete high-rises and commercial buildings. According to one estimate only 350 of the original 6,000 hutongs that stood in Beijing in the 1990s are left and that number is expected to shrink to 25 in the not too distant future. Even protected hutongs are being bulldozed. The government claims that the hutongs are overcrowded, dangerous and unsanitary. Some houses are more than 100 meters away from the nearest toilet. Others lack plumbing and have no way to put out fires that could result in dozens of deaths. Some hutongs were removed to make way for 2008 Olympic development. 

Few hutong residents see their neighborhoods as historic districts. Many are not disinclined to move as long as they receive adequate compensation that allows them to find another affordable place to live. In some cases the old courtyard houses have been divided so many times that people in them are living in rooms the size of closets with neighbors so close they can almost reach out and touch them. Many hutong residents have been moved to apartment complexes and new homes that look ugly but have all the modern conveniences. In many ways the people who lament the loss of the hutongs the most are Western tourists, old timers who were comfortable in the hutongs and residents who did not receive adequate compensation. 

Members of the intelligentsia—particularly the advocate Hua Xinmi and the journalist Wang Jun—have taken up the hutong development issue and attracted Western attention. Sensitive to foreign criticism with the Olympics Games approaching, the government drafted a conservation plan and designated 25 protected historic zones in the city center. In recent years the demolition of the hutongs has slowed as result of efforts by preservationists and developers tapping into the gentrification market. 

Some of the last remaining courtyard yard houses have bought up by gentrification developers who install modern toilets and other amenities and selling the houses to upper class Chinese or wealthy foreign investors. Some developers and buyers have spent millions remodeling their houses and installing things like saunas, exercise rooms, modern kitchens and underground garages. But as this is taking place the neighborhoods are losing their identity and character and the fabric of everyday life that hold them together. With single rich families occupying the houses, people no longer spill into the streets 

A good book on hutong life is Last Days of Old Beijing: Life on the Vanished Backstreets of a City Transformed by Micheal Meyer (Walker and Co., 2008). Web Sites: Wikipedia Wikipedia ;China Highlights China Highlights ; Travel China Guide ; Hutong Photography ) 


Life in Shanghai’s Lilongs 

Brook Larmer wrote in National Geographic, “Jin Qijing pretends not to notice the rat scurrying across the pipe in her room. Dinner is on the table—a sweet and fatty braised-pork dish, hongshaorou, that is a Shanghainese favorite—and the elegant 91-year-old with a sweeping, gray coiffure doesn't want to spoil the family meal. Nobody needs to remind Jin that conditions in her traditional Shanghai neighborhood, or lilong, have deteriorated since she moved here as a teenager in 1937. Back then her lilong—one of thousands in Shanghai that set modified Chinese courtyard houses on tight European-style lanes—lived up to its name: Baoxing Cun, or "treasure and prosperity village." One family lived in each house, often with a coterie of servants and rickshaw pullers. [Source: Brook Larmer, National Geographic, March 2010] 

Today eight families cram into Jin's two-story home, one per room. There is no plumbing. Jin's kitchen is an electric stove erected on a rickety, makeshift balcony. Nonetheless, when Jin's grandson invited her and her husband to move into a modern apartment complex in the suburbs, she refused. "Where else," Jin asks, "could I find this sense of community?" 

Baoxing Cun's densely packed alleyways still evoke the communal feeling that made lilong the cradle of Shanghainese culture. In the morning, on her way back from the open-air market, Jin passes the shop selling shengjian bao, sweet, pork-filled breakfast buns. She chats with a neighbor hanging laundry on one of the poles that festoon the lane, while a man, still in pajamas, waters his plants. "I'm back!" Jin yells, as she climbs the unlit stairs to her second-floor room. Neighbors' heads pop out of their rooms to greet her. 

In the afternoon Jin and her oldest friends gather on wooden stools in the alleyway—a daily ritual they have followed for decades. With indoor space at a premium, life in the lilong spills outside, turning the lanes into public living rooms. As the women chat in Shanghainese dialect, neighbors stop by to listen, laugh, and interject: a man in an ill-fitting gray suit, a vendor walking his bicycle, an officious woman with a badge from the neighborhood-watch committee reminding Jin to show enthusiasm for Expo 2010. 


Urban Poor in China

Housing, water, sanitation, power and jobs are all in short supply in China's cities. Many of the urban poor are from the countryside. The informal economy is key to a lifestyle described as “informal survivalism.” Developing the informal economy is seen as key to providing jobs and services. 

Since the Deng reforms took hold, an underclass has emerged, made up mainly of unemployed workers and elderly people with minimal pensions and little support from relatives. Government assistance for the poor includes welfare payments for destitute city dwellers. 

Chinese cities have relatively small numbers of homeless people who live under bridges, in abandoned buildings and in bus depots. But that doesn’t mean that the helplessly poor don’t exist. In Beijing, children have been hired by organized crime groups to work as beggars at designated spots. In Shanghai, there was a story about one hungry migrant from Hubei who pretended he had SARS so he could get a free meal. 

On his experiences exploring Shanghai’s oldest neighborhoods, Howard French wrote: “Even in China’s richest city, huge numbers of people eke out a very modest existence. To be sure, these are very often migrants from provinces like Anhui or Jiangsu, or even further afield. But more than most Chinese would suspect — particularly the proud, newly affluent generations of Shanghai people who look at my photographs and sniff wai di ren, or outsiders — a great many of the denizens of the city’s dilapidated but character-rich old quarters are natives.” [Source: Howard W. French, New York Times, August 28, 2009] 


Beijing's Buildings Get User-friendly 

These days architects, developers and builders are seeking LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) accreditation, a voluntary but now highly sought after green building award developed and overseen by a US-based. non-governmental orginization. Only a few Beijing constructions, including the Olympic Village, have so far received LEED certification, although over 150 projects in China have now registered to undergo the rigorous and lengthy inspection process. [Source: Daniel Allen, Asia Times August 18, 2009] 

Under the LEED system, buildings applying for certification are comprehensively reviewed and awarded credits in five green design categories: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality. Those that gain enough credits are awarded LEED certification - a status that invariably boosts real estate profitability as well as residents' long-term health and happiness. [Source: Daniel Allen, Asia Times August 18, 2009] 


Model Cities in China


Broadtown Model City, See Rich In the next 15 years, China plans to establish 432 new cities, most of which will have a population of more than 200,000. One of China's newest cities, Kunshan, resembles a miniature Singapore. It has housing projects with clean toilets, buildings painted in pastels, clean avenues lined with willow trees, tidy garbage-processing centers, a roller-skating rink, clean modern shopping centers, and a 28-story high-rise with a revolving restaurant. 

Describing the model city of Zhangjiang (80 miles inland from Shanghai), Joseph Kahn of the Wall Street Journal wrote: "Sidewalks are hand paved with red clay tiles. Bicyclists don't swerve outside special lanes marked with red-and-white concrete barriers. Motorcyclists park outside the city; they are forbidden to drive within it for safety reasons. New high-rises, checkered with blue-tinted windows, are set well back from broad avenues. Heroic bronze statues of workers wielding shovels and athletes reaching for the sky abound. So do swathes of greenery. Fragrant camphor trees line the streets. The city's official flower, the red azalea, is stacked up by the thousands." 

The public rest rooms in Zhangjiang boasted one official, "smell so clean you could happily sleep in them." There are plans for all the vehicles be powered by electric motors. 


China’s Green Cities 

Bill McKibben wrote in National Geographic, “Rizhao, in Shandong Province, is one of the hundreds of Chinese cities gearing up to really grow. The road into town is eight lanes wide, even though at the moment there's not much traffic. But the port, where great loads of iron ore arrive, is bustling, and Beijing has designated the shipping terminal as the "Eastern bridgehead of the new Euro-Asia continental bridge." A big sign exhorts the residents to "build a civilized city and be a civilized citizen." [Source: Bill McKibben, National Geographic, June 2011] 

In other words, Rizhao is the kind of place that has scientists around the world deeply worried—China's rapid expansion and newfound wealth are pushing carbon emissions ever higher. It's the kind of growth that helped China surge past the United States in the past decade to become the world's largest source of global warming gases. And yet, after lunch at the Guangdian Hotel, the city's chief engineer, Yu Haibo, led me to the roof of the restaurant for another view. First we clambered over the hotel's solar-thermal system, an array of vacuum tubes that takes the sun's energy and turns it into all the hot water the kitchen and 102 rooms can possibly use. Then, from the edge of the roof, we took in a view of the spreading skyline. On top of every single building for blocks around a similar solar array sprouted. Solar is in at least 95 percent of all the buildings, Yu said proudly. "Some people say 99 percent, but I'm shy to say that." 

Whatever the percentage, it's impressive—outside Honolulu, no city in the U.S. breaks single digits or even comes close. And Rizhao's solar water heaters are not an aberration. China now leads the planet in the installation of renewable energy technology—its turbines catch the most wind, and its factories produce the most solar cells.” 

“In the end, anecdote can take you only so far. Even data are often suspect in China, where local officials have a strong incentive to send rosy pictures off to Beijing. But here's what we know: China is growing at a rate no big country has ever grown at before, and that growth is opening real opportunities for environmental progress. Because it's putting up so many new buildings and power plants, the country can incorporate the latest technology more easily than countries with more mature economies. It's not just solar panels and wind turbines. For instance, some 25 cities are now putting in or expanding subway lines, and high-speed rail tracks are spreading in every direction. All that growth takes lots of steel and cement and hence pours carbon into the air—but in time it should drive down emissions.” 


New Tianjin Eco City in China 

China and Singaporean have mapped out a huge eco city for 350,000 people in Tianjin that they hope will be model could be copied across developing countries. The buildings will be the latest word in energy efficiency: 60 percent of all waste will be recycled, and the settlement will be laid out in such a way as to encourage walking and discourage driving.[Source: Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, June 4, 2009] 

The plan to build this settlement, known as Tianjin Eco-City, near the western shore of the Bohai, one of the most polluted seas in the world. Groundbreaking for the the first phas—Tianjin  an ‘eco-business park’ over 150 hectares (370 acres)—took place in 2009. [Ibid] 

Every building is to be insulated, double glazed and made entirely of materials that abide by the government's green standards. To cut car journeys by 90 percent, a light railway will pass close by every home, and zoning will ensure all residents have shops, schools and clinics within walking distance. It will be more verdant than almost any other city in China, with an average of 12 square meters (nearly 130 square feet) of parks or lawns or wetlands for each person. Domestic water use should be kept below 120 liters (26 gallons) per person each day, with more than half supplied by rain capture and recycled grey water. [Ibid] 

One of the first aims of Tianjin Eco-City is show it can avoid the failures that doomed another eco-city, Dongtan (See Below). Goh Chye Boon, chief of the joint venture running the business park at Tianjin Eco-City, said his project had learned from Dongtan that it was better not to reach immediately for the skies. “We aspire to one day be a dream city like Dongtan but we want to take one credible step at a time,” he tolf The Guardian. “Dongtan inspired me, but I think when you reach too high, you may forget that the ultimate beneficiary must be the resident.” [Ibid] 

According to The Guardian the “new city being built in Tianjin is in danger of going too far the other way by not being ambitious enough. Although it will use wind and geothermal power, its target of 20 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2020 is only a tiny improvement on the goal for the national average. The goal for carbon emissions is equally modest.” [Ibid] 


Dongtan, the Failed Chinese Eco-City 

In 2009, Dongtan—the planned eco-city on the salt flats of Chongming island in the Yangtze near Shanghai, which was supposed to be a model for the world by 2010—was pronounced dead. Designed by British eco-engineers and green-minded architects from the London-based consulting group, Arup, the Manhattan-size city was set up to run on renewable energy, be car-free, and recycle all of its water and have and have 25,000 people living in it when the Shanghai World Expo opened in 2010 and when it could be reached by a new tunnel and bridge.[Source: Fred Pearce, The Guardian, April 23, 2009] 

British Prime Minister Tony Blair signed the deal to design and build Dongtan with Chinese president Hu Jin-tao. His deputy, John Prescott, went there twice. So did Britain's top urban planner, Peter Hall, and the London mayor Ken Livingstone, who wanted ideas for greening his urban landscape. Ma Cheng Liang, the man in charge of the project, said in early 2006: ‘We need to reduce our ecological footprint. Dongtan is very significant for Shanghai and the nation. We want to skip traditional industrialization in favor of ecological modernism. Dongtan is a chance to develop new ways of living.” [Ibid] 

When Expo 2010 and the tunnel and bridge opened nothing was in the eco-city except half a dozen wind turbines and an organic farm. There were no houses, no water taxis, no sewage-recycling plant, no energy park. Mentioned of vanished from the Expo website. [Ibid] 


Reasons Dongtan Failed 

Peter Head, the main Arup designer of Dongtan, denied rumor that the project has been a casualty of the political fallout from the conviction of the city boss Chen Liangyu, jailed in 2008 for corruption. Rather said it was the result of the way China operated. “China does everything by the rules handed down from the top. There is a rule for everything. The width of roads, everything. That is how they have developed so fast, by being totally prescriptive. We wanted to change the rules in Dongtan, to do everything different. But when it comes to it, China cannot deliver that.” he said [Source: Fred Pearce, The Guardian, April 23, 2009] 

Paul French, chief China analyst at Access Asia, said Dongtan had died because planners had failed to consult the local community and had aimed too high. “Dongtan was plonked down on everyone. They were going to do everything, but nothing has been realized. It's really important with environmental stuff that you only say what you can actually deliver or people will lose trust.” [Source: Jonathan Watts, The Guardian, June 4, 2009] 


Ordos, China’s Modern Ghost Town 

Ordos, Inner Mongolia is a beautiful modern city. It was built from the ground up in just five years. The streets are clean. And the neighborhoods are quiet. But something is missing. The city was built to accommodate nearly one million people. Yet, no one lives there. 

The city of Ordos was a government project. It was likely conceived as an economic stimulus. Building is a sign of economic growth. So, local officials started building. But five years later no one has moved in. It’s a ghost town without any ghosts. 

Ordos lies in the deserts of southern Inner Mongolia and near coal-mining area of Shaanxi province. It is home to the world's biggest coal company and the planet's most efficient mine. The extensive coal and gas deposits below Ordos has turned this arid, northern outpost into a boom town. The local economy grew eightfold between 2004 and 2009 while the population has swollen almost 20 per cent. 

Ordos offers some insight into what happens when planned cities don’t work out as planned. Ordos had grown rich suppling coal and minerals to the rest of China. As of late 2010 the average per capita income was around $21,000, the highest in the nation and nearly triple the national average. Kangbashi (near Ordos in Inner Mongolia) is known in China as “the empty city.” Between the 2004 and 2010 it was transformed from two villages in the grassland to cluster of grandiose buildings, including an opera house shaped like two traditional Mongolian hats, a library that resembles three massive books and museum that looks like a giant copper boulder. Many of the units in the apartments blocks have been bought up by investors. The only thing that is missing is people. The city has a capacity of 300,000 people. As of 2010 it had about 30,000. 

Bill McKibben wrote in National Geographic, “Ordos may be the fastest growing city in China; even by Chinese standards it has an endless number of construction cranes building an endless number of apartment blocks. The city's great central plaza looks as large as Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and towering statues of local-boy-made-good Genghis Khan rise from the concrete plain, dwarfing the few scattered tourists who have made the trek here. There's a huge new theater, a modernist museum, and a remarkable library built to look like leaning books. Coal built this Dubai-on-the-steppe. The area boasts one-sixth of the nation's total reserves, and as a result, the city's per capita income had risen to $20,000 by 2009. (The local government has set a goal of $25,000 by 2012.) It's the kind of place that needs some environmentalists. [Source: Bill McKibben, National Geographic, June 2011] 

Image Sources: 1) Sholder pole, apartment side and Shanghai neighborhood, Louis Perrochon http://www.perrochon.com/photo/china/ ; 2) Yangtze town, Beifan.com http://www.beifan.com/; 3) Shanghai suburb, New York Times ; 4) Plastic trees, Pico Poco blog; 5) Destruction of neighborhoods, Mongabay.com 7) Broadtown, Atlantic Monthly 

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications. 

© 2008 Jeffrey Hays 

Last updated July 2011


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## chicagogeorge

NCT said:


> *The desire to* drive, or on wide roads, ceteris paribus, only exists in very few people,


Yeah right. Only on SSC would anyone make such a statement....

China for example...



> *Dying for a Spot: China’s car ownership growth is driving a national parking space shortage*
> 
> Posted: 10. Jan, 2011 Last update: 30. Jul, 2011
> 
> Major Chinese cities are suffering from a serious shortage of parking space as supporting* infrastructure lags rapid car fleet growth.* In Luoyang, a man was beaten to death recently in a fight over a parking space.
> *China had 79 million cars on its roads in 2009, according to the National Bureau of Statistics and we estimate the number for 2010 is roughly 85.5 million vehicles.*
> In eight cities we examined, parking fees likely account for more than 1/3 of the annual costs of owning a car for owners who must pay for parking. Tighter restrictions or higher fees and taxes related to parking could discourage potential car buyers in the next 12 months.


http://www.chinasignpost.com/wp-con..._17_China-parking-space-shortage_20110110.pdf


Necessity isn't necessarily _driving_ car ownership growth, upward mobility in China now plays a huge role for sure.


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## Jay

the spliff fairy said:


> Add to that Chengdu, Suzhou, Harbin, Nanjing and that makes 11 cities currently over 10 million.
> 
> In a few years numerous places currently seeing record growth will join that like Xian, Changsha, Hangzhou, Changchun, Fuzhou (7 million), Qingdao (7.5 million) - if not already as they dont count migrants. For example places like Suzhou that Ive mentioned above has a resident permit holders counted at 6.6 million, but the council for once also counts migrants, of which 4 million registered voluntarily.


Where is that being counted from? 

I spent time in Harbin and there is no way it has 10 million people, not in the city alone at least. More like 3.


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## chornedsnorkack

Jay said:


> Where is that being counted from?
> 
> I spent time in Harbin and there is no way it has 10 million people, not in the city alone at least. More like 3.


Harbin DOES have 10,6 million people.

Harbin also has a territory of over 53 000 square km. Larger than entire Netherlands, and also less populous.

Harbin contains 7 counties, 3 county level cities and 8 districts.

5 districts - Daoli, Nangang, Daowai, Xiangfang and Pingfang - have 4,28 million people combined, over a territory of 1353 square km. Each of the 5 districts has population density of at least 1929 per square km.

Every other district, city and county of Harbin has population density of no more than 350 per square km.


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## VECTROTALENZIS

*Now the majority of the population in China live in urban areas!

About urbanization rate is now 51.3%.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-01/17/content_14461784.htm*


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## hkskyline

*China's urban migrants hold key to domestic demand*
Mon, Feb 20, 2012

SHANGQIU, China (Reuters) - Liu Tao knows he will never be rich enough to own one of the luxury apartments in Beijing that he has been paid to decorate for more than a decade, but he's saving hard so that in another 10 years he'll have enough for a home with indoor plumbing.

Like many of the 158 million rural migrant workers whose annual pilgrimages to city factories have fuelled China's economic ascent, Liu has seen his pay and living standards rise steadily, but he still isn't the free-spending consumer the country's leaders urgently want him to be.

"I need to save up to take care of the kids and I've got the old people to look after," the 37-year-old father of three told Reuters, standing in the unheated, sparsely furnished main room of his house in Zhoulou village, about an hour's drive from Shangqiu in Henan province, southwest of Beijing.

Liu's main spending constraint is not earning power.

His 3,000-4,000 yuan ($75-635) per month is well above the average migrant pay of 2,049 yuan charted by statistics -- but a permit system (hukou) that denies millions of officially rural residents access to social services in cities where they work.

"If you go to the big cities and you see all the tower blocks and tall buildings, they've been built by migrant laborers, but we don't see any of the benefits. The government needs to make sure more of that wealth is shared with migrant laborers," Liu said.

It's a vital message for a Chinese leadership anxious to turn a nation of savers into spenders and rebalance the world's second biggest economy towards its huge domestic market. That would cut dependence on external demand jolted by financial crises twice in three years, with current trends pointing to the slowest year of economic expansion in a decade.

Stability and steady growth are core to the Communist Party's justification for more than 60 years of one-party rule, making it acutely sensitive to anything that could dislodge it. But the leadership has yet to show the will to grasp a reform that some of its own economic advisers say is crucial.

The 600 million people China has lifted out of rural poverty by 30 years of development remain far from urban affluence. Inequality soars beside skyscrapers and dollar billionaires and IMF data show that consumption as a share of disposable income has plunged 20 percentage points in the last decade.

With city dwellers topping 50 percent of the population for the first time last year, it signals that Beijing cannot unlock the potential of urbanization unless it reforms the hukou system to turn migration into permanent city settlement.

Access to schools, hospitals and other services is allocated by hukou, keeping them out of reach of migrant workers.

"The hukou system is preventing the arrival of the Lewis turning point," said Yukon Huang, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former student of Nobel-prize winning economist, Arthur Lewis, whose theory of economic development is a focus for investors and policymakers.

It postulates that once all excess labor in a developing economy has been absorbed into the workforce, further capital accumulation delivers self-sustaining wage and economic growth.

ELUSIVE SWEET SPOT

It's a sweet spot eluding Beijing, despite having turned its top companies into global leaders in terms of market share and profits, and amassing the largest store of foreign wealth on the planet at $3.18 trillion -- much of it the last 10 years.

Migrants have barely had a sniff of the riches, although they produce most of the economy's value added growth in the 200 million jobs they fill in the externally-focused factory sector.

The 95 million people of Henan province -- roughly the population of G7 members Canada and Britain combined -- generated per capita GDP of $3,600 in 2010 as some of China's most active migrant workers. It was barely a tenth of those G7 counterparts.

Wages have risen -- in double digits for years and by 21.2 percent in 2011, government statistics show. But so has saving.

Savings rates of between 30 and 70 percent were the outer ranges of a straw poll of workers in villages near Shangqiu and outside train and bus stations as people queued to get back to the factories after annual trips home for the Lunar New Year.

China officially has 80 trillion yuan on deposit at banks, with analysts estimating roughly the same amount exists under mattresses, confounding economic orthodoxy that says higher wages in the hands of the poor translate smoothly into spending.

"That's not the way we think," said Zhu Sheng, wrestling with the decision of whether to leave her young son with her parents in the Henan countryside and return to the Beijing telecommunications factory where she has worked for five years. She is reluctant to take much lower paid work locally.

"Migrant workers save a lot, that's true. We have to keep saving because we have to take of the kids and the old folks. I can't say how much I'd need to earn not to have to worry about saving," Zhu said.

"In the countryside we have televisions and washing machines already. I wouldn't want to buy another or just replace them unless I had to."

Zhu used a government rebate scheme to buy a new twin tub washing machine last year, spending about 600 yuan.

Her 2-1/2-year old boy was playing in the machine, watched over by his grandmother, in the courtyard outside the entrance to the open, unheated room in which Zhu was seated -- framed portrait of Mao Zedong, founder of Communist China, on the table beside her, with posters of reformist leader Deng Xiaoping and other leaders since then on the facing wall.

Zhu and many others like her save for housing, education and medical bills in the hope of a brighter future.

TOO WORRIED TO SPEND

Signs of those hopes are on display in the brown wheat and corn fields speckled with grave mounts. The most recent ones are festooned with colored paper models of new homes, cars and household goods -- symbols of the prosperity older farmers can only dream of for their afterlife and that of their children.

Research by the OECD Development Centre concludes that urbanization China-style confers only half the benefits it should -- improving income, but constraining consumption.

Factors like inflation also erode willingness to spend.

While most will readily agree that living standards are higher than they were a decade ago, they are far from well-off and feel the pinch of price rises acutely.

The annual rate of inflation hit a three-year high of 6.5 percent last July, exceeded the government's 4 percent target in every month of last year and was still above it in January 2012.

But that still understates the pain felt by rural residents who spend about 40 percent of household income on food, the average price of which rose by 11.8 percent in 2011.

Lorry driver Chen Qingguo estimates that it costs about 10,000 yuan a year to keep his 10-year old daughter fed, clothed, housed and schooled in the village where she and her two-year-old brother are left in the care of grandparents.

Employment contracts providing accommodation and food also inhibit spending. Living in dormitories offers few incentives to acquire goods or spend beyond occasional trips to nearby towns.

"My life's in the factory," said Li Jie, 30, who was heading to a Qingdao tyre factory on the east coast to earn 6,000 yuan a month at production line piece rates and up to 8,000 yuan if he works fast and hard.

Residency rights, or at least access in cities to medical benefits, would be a big help in unlocking migrant savings.

It would magnify the impact of urbanization unfolding across

interior provinces. Analysts at HSBC believe this process will turn China's 31 provinces from the equivalent of poor, Third World countries into places generating wealth like a union of second-tier developed and top-tier developing nations by 2020.

"For sustained growth, the most important source is continuous technological innovation and structural transformation," said World Bank chief economist Justin Lin, who believes China can follow an unprecedented 30 years of 9 percent-plus average growth with another 20 years at 8 percent.

Failure to pursue further fundamental economic restructuring could see it unravel. Get it right and China could grow and create jobs almost regardless of the external environment.

Foreign-funded firms employ about 40 million directly, while economists reckon that China creates about 10,500 jobs for every $100 million of goods it exports.

Total exports of $1.9 trillion in 2011 imply 200 million workers owed their livelihoods to foreign demand, about a quarter of all the people employed in China.

Without reform, that dependence will remain unbroken and the

rate of development will merely absorb the influx from the countryside. In 2011, some 21 million people -- roughly the population of Australia -- become urban wage-earners.

ECONOMIC WILDCARD

But that dynamic is the wildcard that some investors believe will keep growth ticking. It is already creating shortages of workers and raising wages outside major manufacturing towns.

As China accelerates development inland, closer to the homes of many migrants, it may be possible for them to find jobs in districts where they are officially registered.

In Shangqiu -- capital of China's Shang Dynasty in the second millennium BC -- recruitment agency worker Chen Xiaowei has seen no sign of a slowdown in demand for experienced staff.

"There's going to be a shortage of workers here again this year. People still prefer to work elsewhere for better pay, but the government is still attracting businesses here too. So the shortfall of workers is going to grow and that means the pay gap is going to have to close," he said.

"Things have already changed in recent years. We're catching up with the more prosperous parts of Henan, but we're not there yet."


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## lawdefender

Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Great Bay Area

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area includes Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen, Zhaoqing

Population (2020) : 85 million

In 2021, the Greater Bay Area GDP is expected to reach 12.54 trillion yuan (about 1.82 trillion US dollars), with an actual growth of 8.1%.


Great Bay Area satellite photo in the night (the largest metropolitan area in the world)
































The Great Bay Area Metro Systems Map 2023

Total length of metro system in operation: 1299 km (2022)














The Great Bay Area Rail Transit Map ( including Intercity railways and high speed railways, National Railways, Tram Lines)

Total length of railway in operation: 2300 km (2021)










The Great Bay Area Expressway Map

Total length of expressway in operation: 4776 km (2019)

Total length of expressway under construction: 1400 km


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## lawdefender

2020 average personal bank savings amount per person ranking by Chinese cities

exchange rate 2022-3-29, USD: RMB= 1:6.36

1. Beijing: 196,000 yuan / USD 30,816 per person
2. Shanghai : 148,000 yuan / USD 23,270
3. Hangzhou: 119,000 yuan / USD 18,710
4. Shenyang: 114,000 yuan / USD 17,924
5. Guangzhou: 111,000 yuan / USD 17,452
5. Taiyuan: 111,000 yuan / USD 17,452
7. Tianjin: 107,000 yuan / USD 16,823
8. Shenzhen: 106,000 yuan / USD 16,666
9. Dalian: 105,000 yuan / USD 16,509
10. Nantong: 104,000 yuan / USD 16,352

The last city on the list : Nanning : 51,000 yuan / USD 8,018


Chinese city / Total personal savings amount (100 million yuan) / population 2020 (10,000) / average personal savings amount per person (10,000 yuan)









12城住户存款超万亿：北京人均存款近20万，北方人更爱存钱？


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## lawdefender

2021 Ranking of the number of college students and postgraduate students by Chinese cities

College students: including 2 years higher education college students and undergraduate students

1. Guangzhou , college students: 1,412,600, postgraduate students: 145,700
total : 1,558,300 (ranking first in the world)



2. Zhengzhou, total : 1,331,600
3. Wuhan : 1,288,300
4. Chengdu : 1,102,000
5. Chongqing: 1,100,100
6. Beijing: 1,009,000
7. Xian: 978,800
8. Nanjing: 918,100
9. Changsha: 810,300
10. Shanghai: 739,700



Rank——City—college students in school -postgraduate students in school- Total(10,000)












在校大学生数量排名：广州成中国高校第一城，郑州第二武汉第三


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## lawdefender

2021 data of higher education in China

dada source: Ministry of Education

The total number of students in colleges and universities exceeds 44.3 million

China's population with higher education( 2 years and above) : 240 million

China's higher education gross enrollment rate : 57.8%










教育部：我国接受高等教育的人口达到2.4亿 高等教育毛入学率达57.8%_广州日报大洋网


教育部今天召开第二场“教育这十年”“1+1”系列新闻发布会，介绍党的十八大以来我国高等教育改革发展成效有关情况。



news.dayoo.com


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## lawdefender

2020 Chinese cities ranking by population living in city area

data source: 2020 census

The largest metro area in China with population living in city area more than 20 million:

Guangzhou - Foshan metro area with population living in city area: 23.4 million 



Mega city : more than 10 million population living in city area

1.Shanghai : 19.87 million
2. Beijing : 17.75 million
3. Shenzhen : 17.43 million
4. Chongqing : 16.34 million
5. Guangzhou : 14.87 million
6. Chengdu : 13.34 million
7. Tianjin : 10.93 million

Super city : between 5 million to 10 million population living in city area

14 cities

Big city type 1: between 3 to 5 million population living in city area

14 cities

Metro system allowed to build in China: more than 3 million population living in city area.



Big city type 2: between 1 to 3 million population living in city area

69 cities


Medium city : between 0.5 to 1 million population living in city area

Small city : under 0.5 million population living in city area









新城市志｜七座超大城市之后，谁能晋级第八席？


新城市志｜七座超大城市之后，谁能晋级第八席？



finance.sina.com.cn






City/Province located/Registered population/population living in city area/city category


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