What Does a Shift Towards Urbanization Really Look Like?

In the summer of my ninth grade year, my family drove on the newly paved roads past fields of sheep and rows of menggubao to Inner Mongolia to visit my extended family on my father’s side. Driving from urban Beijing to Inner Mongolia is quite a scene change. The tall buildings and gray smogged skies fade away to fields of wildflowers and welcoming sunshine under a bright blue sky. At that time, I had no idea of what to expect in the little village my father had grown up in. I expected pure farmland, and in some ways, in 2016, it was. Houses were spread far apart and the buildings were made out of mudbrick as dogs and chickens scattered around the dusty unpaved roads.

On the other hand, signs of urbanization from Mongolia's communist government were also present. In that year, my uncle was pushed off of his land in exchange for an apartment on the 10th floor of a to-be-developed highrise apartment complex. How has this huge push towards urbanization affected the economy? Former farmers and landowners are urged out of their homes in the promise of monetary compensation and a new home in a newly developed urban apartment complex. However, is this huge push successful in boosting the economies of these formerly rural landscapes? Or does this urban over rural mindset result in worse repercussions for the Chinese economy overall? 

In just thirty years China has changed from being a primarily agricultural society into being an urban-centered mammoth. Migration led to an influx of people into China’s city centers, which further led to the attraction of top firms and technology tyrants such as Huawei and Tencent (Kemp). Large populations resulted in a new viable market. Hence, foreign investment quickly became the roots of the economic boost in the city centers of China. Thus, in a way, the Chinese government’s goal of making more urban centers in order to attract migration and investments did make sense. 

However, there is another side of this huge urbanization movement that isn’t so pretty. For newly developed urban centers like Kangbashi, the shining buildings create a ghost town infested with debt. This particular city has spent 14 years building its shiny exterior of highrise buildings and yet now its debt has inflated to 250% of its total budget (Fong). The cost of infrastructure and highrise buildings were meant to be balanced out by the high influx of people who are supposed to migrate in. However, due to the limited retail options within the new city—for example, a trip to the nearest grocery shop is a little more than a half-hour away in Kangbashi—there is a low incentive for people to move in (Fong). And this low incentive feeds into a positive feedback loop that discourages huge technology firms and retail centers to set up shops, which then discourages foreign investment--depressing the local economy. 

Additionally, the push for urbanization may lead to further discontent due to a loss of the calm rural lifestyle. In Specialization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post-Mao China written by Yan, we see the perspective of the migrating women. In Yan’s interviews with Grandmother Four and several other women, he asked about whether the women thought they had changed due to working domestically in the city of Beijing and if it was hard to change back to the rural lifestyle in the countryside. However, the women have emphasized that they didn’t have a comfortable life when working outside and stated “‘why wouldn’t we be happy to return to [village life]?’” (Yan). Thus this continued identification as rural women and the continued mass urbanization movement may lead to internally displaced people who do not have enough skills to work at a sustainable job in the city leading to a lowering of their living standards and the feeling of “cultural” displacement. 

A third negative effect is derived from the current Hukou system that further pushes rural residents down the list of importance when compared with urban residents. Currently, around 700 to 800 million people from rural areas, after they have migrated to urban areas to find a job, have no access to basic welfare and state-provided services given to the urban residents (Chan). Displaced and at a disadvantage, the rural residents become “second class citizens” who struggle to pay the rising living costs (Chan). Such high living costs lead to increased urban migration towards well-established cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, or Hongkong where urban economic centers thrive. Meanwhile, the misconception of urban expansion stemming from local government damages the economy through debt and reverses the initial intent of urbanization--economic prosperity. 

Although the communist government is pushing towards urbanization in the reform era, the truth is, this misconception of urban lands over rural lands has led to forms of economic ruin. As gleaming skyscrapers go up, the positive cycle of no well-formed retail centers and low migration flow leads to a well of mounting debt decimating the local economy. Additionally, the possibility of underproductivity due to misallocating our labor force to work in an urban landscape when they would be more productive in a rural setting leads to a myriad of issues regarding human rights, the feeling of internal cultural displacement, and stunting economic progress. Yes, the rural to urban movement is happening, but it begs us to question is this movement moving too fast, stemming from the unproven ideology that only urban centers can lead to economic profitability? 

Sources:

Chan, Kam Wing. “The Household Registration System and Migrant Labor in China: Notes on a Debate.”

Fong, Dominique. “China’s Ghost Towns Haunt Its Economy”. Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2018, www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-ghost-towns-haunt-its-economy-1529076819. Accessed October 16, 2019. 

Kemp, Ted and Kelly Olsen. “Four Charts Show How Much China’s Economy has Changed in Four Years”.  CNBC, 4, June 2019, www.cnbc.com/2019/06/05/china-economic-growth-trade-tourism-and-urbanization-have-leaped.html. Accessed October 16, 2019. 

Hairong, Yan. “Specialization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post-Mao China.” American Ethnologist, vol. 30, no. 4, 2003, pp. 578–596. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3805250.

Editors: Urvi Agrawal, Belicia Rodriguez