Huge city a test-case for China's urban future

FE Team | Published: June 18, 2007 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

CHONGQING, China, June 17 (AFP): As China becomes a more urban society, its leaders could not do better than look to Chongqing, deep in the nation's southwest, for lessons about managing vast and sprawling cities.
Rapid economic growth has made Chongqing a magnet for those in China's vast rural hinterland with little to lose and everything to gain, adding two million migrants to the city's four million permanent residents in recent years.
They all squeeze onto the same 500 square kilometres between the green waters of the Jialing River and Yangtze's mud-coloured stream, where real estate has become a precious commodity.
"I've never had a house I couldn't rent out," said 32-year-old Chen Juncai, one of 10 employees at Jiangzhou Real Estate Agency, who was been in the business since 1998.
"Of course, I'm great at what I'm doing, but more importantly, the market demand is just so huge."
Chen himself is a migrant from neighbouring Sichuan province, and he never wants to go back. Why leave an economy that has grown 14 per cent so far this year? Like countless others, he wants to be part of the action.
Chongqing is at the vortex of an urbanisation drive that is affecting the entire surrounding region, a municipality roughly the size of Austria with a total population of 32 million.
Just 10 years ago, a mere 28 per cent of those 32 million lived in cities, but now that has grown to 46 per cent, and the trend could continue for at least a couple more decades, local officials estimate.
This means that half a million of the municipality's farmers become city dwellers every year, posing enormous urban planning problems -- which are, however, far from unique.
"What we see in Chongqing, we see in all other major cities in China," said Zhou Liping, a population specialist at the Western Development Research Institute attached to east China's Hangzhou University.
"Farmers who can't find employment at home arrive to take jobs in industry and service. It's a trend that won't change," she said.
It is arguably the most profound transformation in Chinese history, greater even than the end of the empire or the coming of communism.
It is so significant because it turns a society that has been rural for millennia into a nation of city dwellers, all within a span of a few generations.