While there are aspects of this transformation that I certainly agree
with, I have ample misgivings. It fails to understand that the land
actually needs the people. Better, the people need to be empowered
and not be treated as chattels.
On the other hand, this can be achieved this way around also. It is
important that everyone lives in modernity. That means ample food,
clean living conditions and access to entertainment and knowledge.
If after that you jump into an electric go-car that delivers you in
twenty minutes to a chunk of land you are responsible for, then what
is the complaint? This is were we are all ending up at within the
next three decades.
The challenge is to make it work well and to make sure our life ways
improve.
My own agenda is saying much the same although I am desirous of
attaching the living towers to a owned square mile of working farm in
order to optimize labor availability to support general husbandry.
China’s Great
Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities
By IAN JOHNSON
JUNE 15, 2013
BEIJING — China is
pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural
residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen
years — a transformative event that could set off a new wave of
growth or saddle the country with problems for generations to come.
The government, often
by fiat, is replacing small rural homes with high-rises, paving over
vast swaths of farmland and drastically altering the lives of rural
dwellers. So large is the scale that the number of brand-new Chinese
city dwellers will approach the total urban population of the United
States — in a country already bursting with megacities.
This will decisively
change the character of China, where the Communist Party insisted for
decades that most peasants, even those working in cities, remain tied
to their tiny plots of land to ensure political and economic
stability. Now, the party has shifted priorities, mainly to find a
new source of growth for a slowing economy that depends increasingly
on a consuming class of city dwellers.
The shift is occurring
so quickly, and the potential costs are so high, that some fear rural
China is once again the site of radical social engineering. Over the
past decades, the Communist Party has flip-flopped on peasants’
rights to use land: giving small plots to farm during 1950s land
reform, collectivizing a few years later, restoring rights at the
start of the reform era and now trying to obliterate small
landholders.
Across China,
bulldozers are leveling villages that date to long-ago dynasties.
Towers now sprout skyward from dusty plains and verdant hillsides.
New urban schools and hospitals offer modern services, but often at
the expense of the torn-down temples and open-air theaters of the
countryside.
“It’s a new world
for us in the city,” said Tian Wei, 43, a former wheat farmer in
the northern province of Hebei, who now works as a night watchman at
a factory. “All my life I’ve worked with my hands in the fields;
do I have the educational level to keep up with the city people?”
China has long been
home to both some of the world’s tiniest villages and its most
congested, polluted examples of urban sprawl. The ultimate goal of
the government’s modernization plan is to fully integrate 70
percent of the country’s population, or roughly 900 million people,
into city living by 2025. Currently, only half that number are.
The building frenzy is
on display in places like Liaocheng, which grew up as an entrepôt
for local wheat farmers in the North China Plain. It is now ringed by
scores of 20-story towers housing now-landless farmers who have been
thrust into city life. Many are giddy at their new lives — they
received the apartments free, plus tens of thousands of dollars for
their land — but others are uncertain about what they will do when
the money runs out.
Aggressive state
spending is planned on new roads, hospitals, schools, community
centers — which could cost upward of $600 billion a year, according
to economists’ estimates. In addition, vast sums will be needed to
pay for the education, health care and pensions of the ex-farmers.
While the economic
fortunes of many have improved in the mass move to cities,
unemployment and other social woes have also followed the enormous
dislocation. Some young people feel lucky to have jobs that pay
survival wages of about $150 a month; others wile away their days in
pool halls and video-game arcades.
Top-down efforts to
quickly transform entire societies have often come to grief, and
urbanization has already proven one of the most wrenching changes in
China’s 35 years of economic transition. Land disputes account for
thousands of protests each year, including dozens of cases in recent
years in which people have set themselves aflame rather than
relocate.
The country’s new
prime minister, Li Keqiang, indicated at his inaugural news
conference in March that urbanization was one of his top priorities.
He also cautioned, however, that it would require a series of
accompanying legal changes “to overcome various problems in the
course of urbanization.”
Some of these problems
could include chronic urban unemployment if jobs are not available,
and more protests from skeptical farmers unwilling to move. Instead
of creating wealth, urbanization could result in a permanent
underclass in big Chinese cities and the destruction of a rural
culture and religion.
The government has
been pledging a comprehensive urbanization plan for more than two
years now. It was originally to have been presented at the National
People’s Congress in March, but various concerns delayed that,
according to people close to the government. Some of them include the
challenge of financing the effort, of coordinating among the various
ministries and of balancing the rights of farmers, whose land has
increasingly been taken forcibly for urban projects.
These worries delayed
a high-level conference to formalize the plan this month. The plan
has now been delayed until the fall, government advisers say. Central
leaders are said to be concerned that spending will lead to inflation
and bad debt.
Such concerns may have
been behind the call in a recent government report for farmers’
property rights to be protected. Released in March, the report said
China must “guarantee farmers’ property rights and interests.”
Land would remain owned by the state, though, so farmers would not
have ownership rights even under the new blueprint.
On the ground,
however, the new wave of urbanization is well under way. Almost every
province has large-scale programs to move farmers into housing
towers, with the farmers’ plots then given to corporations or
municipalities to manage. Efforts have been made to improve the
attractiveness of urban life, but the farmers caught up in the
programs typically have no choice but to leave their land.
The broad trend began
decades ago. In the early 1980s, about 80 percent of Chinese lived in
the countryside versus 47 percent today, plus an additional 17
percent that works in cities but is classified as rural. The idea is
to speed up this process and achieve an urbanized China much faster
than would occur organically.
The primary motivation
for the urbanization push is to change China’s economic structure,
with growth based on domestic demand for products instead of relying
so much on export. In theory, new urbanites mean vast new
opportunities for construction companies, public transportation,
utilities and appliance makers, and a break from the cycle of farmers
consuming only what they produce. “If half of China’s population
starts consuming, growth is inevitable,” said Li Xiangyang, vice
director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics, part of a
government research institute. “Right now they are living in rural
areas where they do not consume.”
Skeptics say the
government’s headlong rush to urbanize is driven by a vision of
modernity that has failed elsewhere. In Brazil and Mexico,
urbanization was also seen as a way to bolster economic growth. But
among the results were the expansion of slums and of a stubborn
unemployed underclass, according to experts.
“There’s this
feeling that we have to modernize, we have to urbanize and this is
our national-development strategy,” said Gao Yu, China country
director for the Landesa Rural Development Institute, based in
Seattle. Referring to the disastrous Maoist campaign to industrialize
overnight, he added, “It’s almost like another Great Leap
Forward.”
The costs of this
top-down approach can be steep. In one survey by Landesa in 2011, 43
percent of Chinese villagers said government officials had taken or
tried to take their land. That is up from 29 percent in a 2008
survey.
“In a lot of cases
in China, urbanization is the process of local government driving
farmers into buildings while grabbing their land,” said Li Dun, a
professor of public policy at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Farmers are often
unwilling to leave the land because of the lack of job opportunities
in the new towns. Working in a factory is sometimes an option, but
most jobs are far from the newly built towns. And even if farmers do
get jobs in factories, most lose them when they hit age 45 or 50,
since employers generally want younger, nimbler workers.
“For old people like
us, there’s nothing to do anymore,” said He Shifang, 45, a farmer
from the city of Ankang in Shaanxi Province who was relocated from
her family’s farm in the mountains. “Up in the mountains we
worked all the time. We had pigs and chickens. Here we just sit
around and people play mah-jongg.”
Some farmers who have
given up their land say that when they come back home for good around
this age, they have no farm to tend and thus no income. Most are
still excluded from national pension plans, putting pressure on
relatives to provide.
The coming
urbanization plan would aim to solve this by giving farmers a
permanent stream of income from the land they lost. Besides a flat
payout when they moved, they would receive a form of shares in their
former land that would pay the equivalent of dividends over a period
of decades to make sure they did not end up indigent.
This has been tried
experimentally, with mixed results. Outside the city of Chengdu, some
farmers said they received nothing when their land was taken to build
a road, leading to daily confrontations with construction crews and
the police since the beginning of this year.
But south of Chengdu
in Shuangliu County, farmers who gave up their land for an
experimental strawberry farm run by a county-owned company said they
receive an annual payment equivalent to the price of 2,000 pounds of
grain plus the chance to earn about $8 a day working on the new
plantation.
“I think it’s
O.K., this deal,” said Huang Zifeng, 62, a farmer in the village of
Paomageng who gave up his land to work on the plantation. “It’s
more stable than farming your own land.”
Financing the
investment needed to start such projects is a central sticking point.
Chinese economists say that the cost does not have to be completely
borne by the government — because once farmers start working in
city jobs, they will start paying taxes and contributing to social
welfare programs.
“Urbanization can
launch a process of value creation,” said Xiang Songzuo, chief
economist with the Agricultural Bank of China and a deputy director
of the International Monetary Institute at Renmin University. “It
should start a huge flow of revenues.”
Even if this is true,
the government will still need significant resources to get the
programs started. Currently, local governments have limited revenues
and most rely on selling land to pay for expenses — an
unsustainable practice in the long run. Banks are also increasingly
unwilling to lend money to big infrastructure projects, Mr. Xiang
said, because many banks are now listed companies and have to satisfy
investors’ requirements.
“Local governments
are already struggling to provide benefits to local people, so why
would they want to extend this to migrant workers?” said Tom
Miller, a Beijing-based author of a new book on urbanization in
China, “China’s Urban Billion.” “It is essential for the
central government to step in and provide funding for this.”
In theory, local
governments could be allowed to issue bonds, but with no reliable
system of rating or selling bonds, this is unlikely in the near term.
Some localities, however, are already experimenting with programs to
pay for at least the infrastructure by involving private investors or
large state-owned enterprises that provide seed financing.
Most of the costs are
borne by local governments. But they rely mostly on central
government transfer payments or land sales, and without their own
revenue streams they are unwilling to allow newly arrived rural
residents to attend local schools or benefit from health care
programs. This is reflected in the fact that China officially has a
53 percent rate of urbanization, but only about 35 percent of the
population is in possession of an urban residency permit, or hukou.
This is the document that permits a person to register in local
schools or qualify for local medical programs.
The new blueprint to
be unveiled this year is supposed to break this logjam by
guaranteeing some central-government support for such programs,
according to economists who advise the government. But the exact
formulas are still unclear. Granting full urban benefits to 70
percent of the population by 2025 would mean doubling the rate of
those in urban welfare programs.
“Urbanization is in
China’s future, but China’s rural population lags behind in
enjoying the benefits of economic development,” said Li Shuguang,
professor at the China University of Political Science and Law. “The
rural population deserves the same benefits and rights city folks
enjoy.”
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