CHINA: Beijing’s Ambitions Revive Debate about Huge Megacities

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Feb 27 2004 (IPS) - Beijing’s ambition to re-invent itself as an ultra-modern capital of the future has sparked a frenzy of copycat metropolises all over the country, infuriating preservationists and state planners, and re-igniting an old debate about the emergence of megacities in China.

Beijing’s ambition to re-invent itself as an ultra-modern capital of the future has sparked a frenzy of copycat metropolises all over the country, infuriating preservationists and state planners, and re-igniting an old debate about the emergence of megacities in China.

The Chinese capital has just announced an impressive plan to transform itself into a "modern cosmopolitan city with unique characteristics" – bureaucratic jargon that eyes a place for Beijing within the ranks of grand global cities like New York, Tokyo and London.

The final target is set for 2020, when according to Beijing Mayor Wang Qishan the city would be totally modernised and have the infrastructure of a world metropolis. Once this is achieved, the mayor told the annual session of Beijing parliament last week, the capital would be ready to start balancing economic growth with human development.

In preparation for the 2008 Olympics, Beijing is already being subjected to one of the most extensive urban re-engineering projects ever undertaken by an existing city. Independent experts place the tag of re-development upwards of 100 billion U.S. dollars.

A monumental city of great avenues, massive ring roads, grandiose ministries and banks, giant stadiums, towers and shopping emporiums on a Brontosaurian scale, is rising at breathtaking speed. Meantime, the remains of old Beijing are being dwarfed and gradually demolished by this grand re-development.

Even some of the city’s top architects concede that the scorecard is mixed.

"The planning is a big mess, really," says Cui Kai, a well-known architect and deputy president of the city’s planning department. "There has been a spirit of ‘we want to cut off history’. And there has been a lot of greed behind what is being done."

The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), which had declared the inner city of the capital a world heritage site, has raised its voice to protest the callous disregard of preservation by greedy developers working in tacit agreement with local authorities.

From the original 6,000 ‘hutong’, Beijing’s narrow alleys that criss-cross the inner city, a mere 25 are being preserved. Out of a thousand temples, a few dozen will be left, isolated islands set in a grid of eight-lane expressways and overshadowed by giant steel and glass towers.

Preservationists have long charged that by destroying all traces of old China, Beijing would find it hard to measure ranks with cities like Paris and London, which have incorporated the past into their present.

Yet looking backwards is the last thing China’s leaders want to do. A team of technocrats, sworn to developing modern science and high technology, they want to show the future belongs to China.

Beijing’s example has been so tantalising that scores of other Chinese cities have declared they want to become big megalopolises too. The candidates include many beyond Shanghai and Guangzhou – Beijing’s obvious rivals in the booming east and south coasts of the country.

Some 182, or about a third of all Chinese cities, are contenders for the title of international metropolis, says Yao Bing, an official of the Communist party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, according to the English-language ‘China Daily’.

They include Haikou, the capital of China’s island province of Hainan, bidding to be "an open international city with tropical characteristics"; Shenyang in the north – eager to shake off its grim image as a communist industrial base and become a financial centre for north-east Asia – and many others.

A new book, titled ‘2012’, draws a bold picture of a futuristic Global City in the southern province of Hainan island, where China’s urban ambitions are being helped by a flow of international capital and immigrants from 200 countries around the world.

"After 20 years of economic reforms, China has a lot of experience in international trade and has a lot of potential to create the Global City of the future," argues the author He Han. "Hainan, for its part, is the perfect site for it because of its economic edge, rich resources, favourable location and attractive tropical climate”.

Mushrooming local ambitions reflect in part a change in the communist government ‘s traditional opposition to megacities.

In the early years of Chinese economic reforms, started by the late leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, the government promoted smaller cities, believing that large and medium-size metropolises would be destabilised by vast numbers of rural migrants.

In the early 1990s, the government created buffer cities – settlements with populations of less than 500,000 – that were meant to prevent the big cities from swelling to unmanageable proportions. More than 200 buffer cities were established between 1990 and 1997.

Then, alarmed by satellite photos that showed that China was losing more than 500,000 hectares of arable land a year to housing, roads and factories, the government stopped encouraging the expansion of towns.

In recent years, the urbanisation trend has picked up, fuelled by projections that increasing the population of China’s largest cities would boost consumer spending while efficiently preserving land and other resources.

"We anticipate that by 2020 some 300 million to 400 million rural dwellers would have moved to China’s towns and cities," Chen Xiwen, one of China’s top rural-sector officials, told the foreign media recently.

Government officials have also been under increasing pressure to meet world urbanisation rates. Despite being home to 20 percent of humanity, China has only two megacities with population of more than 10 million: Shanghai and Beijing.

Chongqing, which has a registered population of over 30 million, is an artificial megacity created by the union of Chongqing proper and the Three Gorges Basin area. The urbanised population of Chongqing is less than 5 million people.

While the official urbanisation rate of China is 36 percent, many of the country’s supposed city-dwellers are like those in Chongqing – farmers and peasants living in the rural outskirts.

"We have to admit that urbanisation is justified," Zhang Naijian, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Managerial Sciences, told ‘China Daily’. "But if every city wants to be in the swim of building great cities, it will bring disaster to the country and the people".