Abstract
This essay focuses on a new social spatial reorganization plan for urbanization, migration, and rural development in China. The plan addresses China’s need to have urban, peri-urban, and rural areas reorganized in a coordinated way. The goal of the plan is to incorporate hundreds of millions of rural residents into the urban economy and its improved way of life. Rural residents are currently unable to be supported by the traditional farm, yet China’s large cities are already hard-pressed to serve its existing citizens. The plan calls for rural-urban development that is comprehensive, concentrated, and coordinated. The heart of the proposed social space redesign is the creation of the “super-municipality.” This is an enormous political jurisdiction in both geographical size and population to be managed and supported by the central government, and including modernized new Agricultural Commercial Enterprises to transform China’s agricultural sector.
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Notes
This **nhua report uses the precise number of 250 million farmer-migrants and I have extrapolated forward and rounded the figure.
For the projected 2030 figure of migrants, and a comprehensive and detailed data presentation and analysis of China’s rural-to-urban migration see [21]. A more recent book-length discussion of the projected one billion urban Chinese caused by rural migration is [12].
The language “concentrated” versus “dispersed” urbanization is borrowed from [21, especially Chapter 5: “The Opportunity of Concentrated Urbanization,” 128–147].
The MGI Report authors define “supercity” as follows: “truly world-scale megacities with populations of 20 million plus;” an example given is Tokyo [21, 111].
For the latest “National New-Type Urbanization Plan” according to which the exclusionary hukou system will remain in place for cities over 3 million people see, [12, 17]. For smaller cities and towns urban hukou benefits are planned to be distributed by 2020, as noted by the author, [12, 17]. For an analysis and critique of dispersed urbanization see [21, 100–127].
The scholarly literature on the poor conditions for Chinese rural migrants is both large and grim. One such work is: [25].
Both Chengdu and Chongqing were declared National Pilot areas to experiment with ending hukou classifications and extending urban welfare benefits. On Chengdu’s program see [24]. On Chongqing’s ambitious plans for millions of ruralites to be brought into that municipality see [12, 48–59]. This migrant plan of Chongqing will be discussed below. A comprehensive inclusive hukou policy in coordination with rural area reforms for both rural migrants and rural residents seems urgently needed, yet elusive; this is the policy and implementation gap that CRD aspires to fill.
[2]. The China Daily report states: “China plans to phase out its hukou, or household registration system, and help about 100 million settle in towns and cities by 2020.” Still, this latest hukou easing does not provide much-needed social welfare benefits for rural migrants in major and first-tier cities where most of the migrants reside.
Fei-Ling Wang discusses the Chinese government’s apprehension of “the danger of ‘Latin-Americanization’ and concern about decay in the Chinese urban business environment. . “ because of rural migrants flooding into China’s cities, see [19, 345].
Environmental concerns need to be raised here about the domestic and global environmental limits to this projected dramatic increase in China’s material consumption envisioned by a successful CRD policy. What would it mean for existing Global North, wealthy nations like the United States, Germany, Japan, etc.?
Would they make environmental space by slowing down their own economies’ resource use and pollution generated for increased Chinese consumption? Is another 600 million middle class Chinese consumers environmentally feasible, even if economically and politically possible, no matter what the rich Global North nations do? These are urgent questions that whole books could be written on and thus beyond the scope of this essay.
This inevitable clash between urban and rural ways of life that occurred in Chongqing’s People’s Heart Park would be obviated if whole villages (or most of the inhabitants) moved en masse to the peri-urban areas so they could continue to live together in their new and better surroundings.
Miller reports 180,000 protests in 2010; see [12, 64].
I have found two quantified cost estimates for extending urban hukou social welfare benefits to all rural migrant households living in cities, and they are remarkably close. One is 3.80 % GDP (2010) or 1.5 trillion RMB, and the other is 2.50 % of China’s urban GDP by 2025. While certainly significant costs for the central government of China, they do not appear to be infeasible, especially considering the huge political and social benefits. The first estimate is from Miller [12, 57], and the second is from the MGI Report [21, 123].
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Acknowledgment
The author would like to acknowledge and express his gratitude to his colleague, Richard LeGates, for his generosity in sharing several of his co-authored publications and conference papers about the peri-urbanization process in China [see 8 and 24] from which I learned a great deal, although I am not sure he would support the CRD emphasis upon super-municipalities, including the reorganization of the rural areas, as described above. He also read and commented upon an earlier draft of this essay for which I am grateful as well.
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Kassiola, J.J. Coordinated Rural-Urban Development in China: a New Social Spatial Reorganization Plan for Urbanization, Migration, and Rural Development. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 22, 77–95 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-016-9431-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-016-9431-1