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Brooke Wilmsen, La Trobe University, Australia
China is the world’s largest urban nation with in excess of 700 million urbanites (World Bank, 2014). Its urban trajectory is unprecedented with some 250 million people expected to migrate to cities over the next two decades (World Bank, 2014). In 2011, the proportion of China’s urban population overtook its rural population for the first time in history (Gong, Liang et al. 2012). This dramatic rate of urbanisation is no accident; the Chinese Government is actively pursuing the expansion of its urban areas in an effort to maintain its extraordinary rates of economic growth.
China is transforming from an export-led growth economy to a consumption-driven economy and to do this it needs consumers. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, people in urban areas consume more than five times as much as their rural counterparts (Zheng, 2013). So China’s primary producers will become its new consumers. The aim is for urbanites to find more stable and higher paid employment in cities to increase their capacity to spend. This chapter asks if rapid urbanisation is the key to stable economic growth over the coming decades, what are the costs?
Growing urban China
Rural to urban migration has fuelled the dramatic rates of urbanisation seen in China. Recent estimates suggest that by 2010 over 220 million rural people had migrated to cities (that is, for more than 6 months) (National Bureau of Statistics of China in (Akay, Giulietti et al., 2014)). What’s more, rural to urban migration accounted for 56% of urban population growth between 2000 and 2010 (World Bank, 2014, p.88). For the majority of such migrants, relocation is a response to perceived opportunities in urban areas relative to those in the village. In this there is freedom – an element of choice in whether to stay in their rural homes or gamble on an urban life.
There is also a lesser-known driver of urbanisation in China. Large swathes of land are being enclosed by cities. Some 35% of urban population growth between 2000 and 2010 was due to the reclassification of rural areas to urban (World Bank, 2014, p.88). Unlike rural to urban migration, the incorporation of rural residents into an urban area is not self-determined. Instead, a privileged few make key decisions that lead to the reclassification of the village as urban. The decision makers are those who stand to gain most from the transfer of land from rural to urban status – normally powerful land developers and local government. In the process, ruralites are forced to become urbanites.
Forced urbanisation
Forced urbanisation is forbidden in China (Bai, Shi et al., 2014). Even so, Li (2011, p.2) claims that, over the past 20 years, urban sprawl has devoured some four million hectares of land, including the farmland of some 50 million farmers. Between 2001 and 2010, 1.23 million hectares was acquired which affected 26.5 million farmers (McDowell and Morrell, 2010).
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