The burdens of China's growth
Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 12:59AM POST: Wuhan's renewal shows ambitions and challenges of China's urban planning, By Tom Miller, ft.com/dragonbeat, July 6, 2009
Small but good piece on Wuhan (burgeoning Chinese city) planning for its continued expansion.
I like to tell people the story that we adopted Vonne Mei in Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi, and that the city's population is about 4-5m (size of Houston) and yet, when I would check the weather on maps, the city wasn't big enough to warrant a marker!
The urbanization flow inside China is without precedent in human history. Building the hard infrastructure for that is one thing, as this piece points out in its conclusion, but the soft infrastructure . . . that's a whole other ballgame.
And tough as it is to build the hardware of a modern city almost from scratch, it is tougher still to create the necessary software to service a growing population.
For Chinese technocrats, channeling funds into steel and cement is considerably less daunting than addressing the much thornier issue of social security. Building new schools and hospitals is one thing; paying for teachers and doctors is another.
As more and more migrant workers begin to settle permanently in cities, the demand for equitable access to social services will grow. But this intractable problem is not addressed by Wuhan's urban plan for 2020.
We tend to be so impressed with the extensive growth reaching its apogee now in China. But every top expert I've ever met inside China worries deeply about the shift to intensive growth and all that will entail from a single-party state.
(Thanks: jdongweck)
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