[Urbanstudy] China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities

[Vinay Baindur]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-uprooting-moving-250-million-into-cities.html?_r=0





China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities

Articles in this series look at how China's government-driven effort to
push the population to towns and cities is reshaping a nation that for
millenniums has been defined by its rural life.


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By IAN JOHNSONJUNE 15, 2013 545
COMMENTS<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-uprooting-moving-250-million-into-cities.html?_r=0#commentsContainer>

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.

Children walked to school from a housing project in Chongqing, where their
families were resettled after leaving their farmland. Justin Jin for The
New York Times

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?”
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