In an unprecedented step in demographic engineering, China is going ahead with its contentious urbanisation strategy that will entail moving 250 million people from rural areas to shiny new towns and cities over the next 12 years.
The sheer scale of the exercise is staggering – if all goes according to plan, the number of new Chinese urban residents will be almost equal to the population of the US. The Communist Party of China (CPC) top brass is understood to have given a go-ahead to this ambitious plan, which will make China home to 900 million city-dwellers – the world’s largest urban population – by 2025.
If China needed to prove a point that it’s the next big thing on the world stage, this is it, but it’s a huge gamble as well.
The planned urbanisation is part of the larger grand strategy of the new leadership in Beijing to spur the shift from an export-oriented economy to a consumption-driven growth model. Having been used to double-digit growth for three decades, it has come as a bit of a shock to the powers-that-be in China to see the country’s economic growth rate slowing down. Urbanisation has been envisaged as a long-term strategy to ensure sustained growth over the next decade or so. The idea is to build a new consumer class of city dwellers to stabilise the slowing economy, says an analyst, who did not wish to be named.
Dreaming big is fine, but the devil lies in details. If the urbanisation project has to take off, China will need thousands of new schools, hospitals, homes, job opportunities, transport and roads. Analysts say it will cost Beijing a whopping $600 billion a year.
Urbanisation also marks a defining attitudinal shift on part of the top CPC brass. The arguments of rootedness and belonging which tethered the rural population to tiny plots of land have given way to hard-headed pragmatism.
Consumerism is the new mantra. The urbanisation strategy seeks to make all these rural non-consumers consumers of urban products. “Urbanization can launch a process of value creation,” says Xiang Songzuo, chief economist with the Agricultural Bank of China and a deputy director of the International Monetary Institute at Renmin University. “It should start a huge flow of revenues.” There’s this feeling that we have to modernize, we have to urbanize and this is our national-development strategy,” says Gao Yu, China country director for the Landesa Rural Development Institute, based in Seattle.
This mass urbanisation project, however, is fraught with high risks that could affect the generations to come, if it goes awry. To begin with, if the government is unable to provide jobs for the people, a vast majority will have no source of income. Judging by the amount that would be needed to spend, where would china get all the money form? Many farmers are unwilling to leave because the jobs are often far from the newly- built towns.
The government has promised to give free apartments, plus tens of thousands of dollars for the farmer’s land — but many are uncertain about what they will do when the money runs out.
The angst and confusion over urbanisation is seething on microblogging site Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of the twitter. “Our house is freezing – am I going to freeze to death because the heating has stopped? Mom hasn’t slept for days because she’s worried about losing our land. But it’s best not to fight the government directly because in the end, we’ll get the short end of the stick…,” says a note signed off simply as Hebei Province.
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