Two items on China came in today simultaneously. The big picture – the world’s largest megalopolis, Jing-Jin-Ji – is featured in The Daily Conversation:
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China is in the midst of a construction spree unparalleled in human history. These are the Megaprojects that will lift China into the future. China wants to make its capital, Beijing, the center of the world’s largest supercity, by merging three provinces into one continuous megalopolis of 130 million people.
But as The Conversation mentions, the problem is corruption at the local level. Nor do city’s get to keep the tax revenues they collect – hence services are unavailable for the hundreds of thousands of people who move into new towns unready for them.
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Meanwhile, the ongoing demolition of traditional urban villages is documented in a new book, “Dragons in Diamond Village” by David Bandurski, editor of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong – discussed in the New York Times Sinosphere blog.
Corruption is endemic at the village level in China. [President] Xi Jinping is talking about the need to address corruption happening right beside the people.
And there’s no better example of this kind of low-level corruption than what we see happening in village land grabs and forced demolitions, which are leading causes of unrest in China. Many city governments across China rely heavily on revenue from land sales, so there’s a lot of incentive to grab land, which can then be sold to developers. We tend to think these villages are in the countryside, but most in fact are in the cities. …… there’s the question of the tens of thousands of migrants who live in urban villages like Xian. Once they are kicked out, where do they go? They have to move on to other urban villages, just as cramped and probably farther on the outskirts of the city.
So the process of redevelopment usually displaces two types of rural people all at once, leaving behind luxury property developments for the minority super-rich. Party officials want clean and modern city landscapes that make a strong political statement about their competence as planners. But no planning is done for the migrant workers themselves.
In this sense, urban villages are absolutely essential. Without them, it would be virtually impossible to house the millions of migrant workers floating in China’s cities.
Affordable housing seems to be an international problem, doesn’t it? Our current economic system favors big, immediate returns, and you just don’t get that as easily with modest developments.
So how do fix that?