China must follow its own path of urbanisation
Dan Steinbock says urbanisation in 21st-century China will necessarily differ in scale, purpose and circumstance from that in the West 100 years ago, and a direct comparison is misleading
In the next few weeks, Premier Li Keqiang's "new type of urbanisation" is expected to take off. In the West, the response has often been sceptical and occasionally very critical. It is time for a sanity check.
Some critics argue that Beijing is about to create a "Chinese city of 260 million people", which Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, compares with the "Bohai Economic Rim, centred on Beijing and Tianjin". These critics also believe that authorities hope to combine nine major cities in Guangdong into a single city of more than 40 million people, which they call "China's Maoist vision".
True, there is a plan - actually, a long-standing one - to network the infrastructure of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan , Foshan , Huizhou , Zhaoqing , Jiangmen and Zhuhai . But the goal of Chinese planners is not Fritz Lang's nightmarish Metropolis. Rather, they hope to integrate cities with provinces, and provinces with the nation. By strengthening ties of these megacities, they will strengthen the Chinese economy, social cohesion and urban welfare.
Ironically, big-city dreams are less appealing to Chinese leaders, who seem to prefer urbanisation based on medium-sized cities of between one and five million people, whereas many Western consultants advocate the idea of large-city urbanisation, due to economic efficiencies.
In reality, Chinese scenarios are no different from the kind of interplay of industrialisation and urbanisation that first took place in Britain. What is different is China's population size.