At Beijing's annual municipal people's congress, officials
declared their ambitious target of setting the number of permanent
residents of the capital at 16 million by the year 2010.
Liu Zhihua, vice mayor of Beijing, admitted it will be very
difficult for the city to achieve this goal.
With per capita water resources at only an eighth of the
national average level and land resources at one-fifth the national
average, the city is facing a resources shortage and population
explosion.
As increasing natural resources is out of the question, the vice
mayor said on Sunday that economic, legal and scientific means
would be employed to control and adjust the size of the
population.
The vice mayor did not elaborate on these means, but emphasized
the city would rely less on administrative approaches to population
control.
Many major cities and provincial capitals are confronted by a
similar crisis. On one hand, unlimited expansion of urban areas has
given rise to various management problems; on the other hand, it is
unfair and unrealistic to prohibit rural people from swarming into
cities and urban residents from small cities into larger ones.
The disparity between rural and urban areas and between large
and small cities in terms of living conditions and opportunities
for better lives and careers is at the very root of the
problem.
Urbanization is believed to be a process that may bridge the
gap, but it is unrealistic to think that enough cities can be
constructed for everyone, or that existing cities can be expanded
to absorb millions of rural citizens.
Statistics show nearly 100 million rural migrant workers are
employed in urban areas, clustered in big cities such as Shanghai,
Beijing, Guangzhou and other provincial capitals.
How to successfully assimilate them into the cities where they
live and work is an important part of the country's urbanization
process.
Migrant workers contribute to economic growth in urban areas,
but they do not enjoy the same benefits and rights as permanent
urban residents.
Although many cities have started to make plans to improve
living conditions for rural migrant workers, much more needs to be
done before they can really be said to have been assimilated.
But what about rural people left on the farmland? More and more
laborers from the countryside are expected to swarm into cities,
which cannot expand indefinitely.
That explains why the Central Party Committee (
CPC) put forward the task of building a new socialist
countryside and why some urbanization experts have suggested the
country's urbanization process is at a critical stage when urban
industry should support the development of agriculture and the
central government's financial policies should favor rural
development.
With the world's largest rural population, unbalanced
agricultural development and varied natural conditions in the vast
rural areas, a unified policy for urbanization cannot be expected
to apply in every set of circumstances.
The example of Huaxi Village, where agriculture and industry
have developed in a balanced manner and common prosperity has been
realized among villagers, should be mirrored in other
locations.
In this village in east China's Zhejiang Province, every family
has its own big house measuring several hundred square meters, its
own cars and all the facilities urban dwellers benefit from. The
majority of villagers do not make their living by farming in
Huaxi.
This should be one of the options considered in the framework of
the country's urbanization drive.
However, given China's large population, food provision will be
a concern for a long time to come in the process of economic
development.
Urbanization should not be realized at the cost of the
agricultural sector.
Cities should not expand ad infinitum as this approach will
certainly mean the loss of arable farmland.
(China Daily January 17, 2006)