TO GRASP THE size of China’s largest cities, and the pace of expansion of even the remotest of them, consider the south-western city of Kunming. Looking at a map, it would be easy to dismiss it as a backwater, tucked in a mountainous subtropical corner of China that borders on some of South-East Asia’s poorest countries: Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar. Yunnan, the province of which Kunming is the capital, is one of China’s most backward, with a nominal GDP per person roughly that of Albania. By the standards of China’s provincial capitals Kunming’s urban population is merely middling, yet at 3.8m it roughly equals that of America’s second-largest city, Los Angeles. By the end of this decade it is likely to have risen by 50%.
There will, however, be no mushrooming of shanty towns along the shore of Dian Lake, Yunnan’s largest and the one-time pride of Kunming (ill-regulated urban growth has since turned it so toxic that its water is deemed unfit even for industrial use). Officials have what they think is a far better plan: building a new suburb called Chenggong. This will account for most of a projected 40% expansion of the built-up area of the city of Kunming. Kunming’s urban-planning exhibition promises “a beautiful environment” for Chenggong.
Work on the new addition is already well under way. Thickets of residential tower blocks and office buildings are sprouting. Chenggong was connected to Kunming’s new metro network last year. City-government offices and local universities have already moved there. By 2016 it will have a $525m bullet-train station with one of its 30 tracks connecting to Shanghai, 2,000km (1,200 miles) to the east. By the end of this decade the population of Chenggong is expected to reach nearly 1m, three times its current level. Not so long ago Chenggong was derided as a ghost city in the making. Few are now so scornful.
Kunming’s orgy of urban expansion sits oddly with a long-established Chinese policy of seeking to limit the population growth of large cities. An urban-planning law adopted in 1989 calls for strict control. Even after a decade of huge expansion in which the urban population of Beijing (including its satellite towns) grew by about 7m to nearly 17m, the party still clings to the hope that it can keep such expansion in check. When it unveiled plans for wide-ranging economic reforms last November, it called again for “strict control over the population size of extra-large cities”. For all the party’s recent emphasis on the role of market forces, they are still not allowed to determine people’s movements.
Kunming could now argue that it is not “extra-large”. The central government’s new urbanisation plan released in March suggests that the term applies only to cities with urban populations over 5m. On this definition only about 15 cities qualify, and they do not include Kunming. Previously, however, “extra-large” had meant any city with more than 1m people, of which China has more than 130. (America, by contrast, has a mere nine in this category.) A little redefinition goes a long way.
The central government wants cities to grow, but prefers the smaller ones to grow faster than the rest. Its new urbanisation plan calls for hukou barriers to be scrapped altogether in cities with fewer than 500,000 urban residents. Those bigger than 500,000 have been asked to remove or relax hukou rules, but in an “orderly” or “reasonable” manner, meaning not all at once. In extra-large cities tough hukou restrictions are to remain in place. Yet in the past decade the populations of small cities have been shrinking, largely because bigger ones have proved to be a much more powerful draw for migrants.
Plenty of room for more
The government’s worries about population size are overblown. Chinese cities are by no means unusually crowded. Three Chinese scholars, Ming Lu and Zhao Chen of Shanghai’s Fudan University and Zheng Xu of the University of Connecticut, argue in a recent paper that apart from cities with 10m people or more, the average big city in China has “a lot of room for growth”. Even greater Beijing, which city officials think is bursting at the seams, is far less densely populated than greater Tokyo.
Rather than try to control population size, the central government would do better to have a go at curbing the spatial expansion of cities. Local bureaucrats have a predilection for vast areas of concrete. Plazas, broad boulevards and colossal airports and railway stations have become their badges of honour. In the central city of Zhengzhou, what local officials called the largest bullet-train station in Asia opened in 2012: a $2.4 billion edifice with a plaza in front which together cover around 240 hectares (about 340 football pitches). The station is half-deserted.
Such extravagant use of land and money will only increase if the government continues to encourage cities to expand their populations. Built-up areas across the country have recently been growing by an average of 8% a year whereas their populations have been rising by only 5%. In western China the gap is far wider, with urban areas growing three times faster than their populations, according to Fudan University’s Mr Lu. Kunming provides evidence of extravagant habits. Luo Chun, a professor at Yunnan University, reckons his institution’s new campus in Chenggong district is five times the size of its old one in the centre of Kunming. The original campus remains in use.
Central officials are concerned about this, but for the wrong reasons. They fear that urban sprawl could make it more difficult for China to maintain near-self-sufficiency in staple foods. The country is already hovering close to what officials describe as a “red line” of 120m hectares available for planting such crops. Even so, grain production has been rising. Thanks to fewer people in the countryside, farming is becoming more efficient.
A better reason to worry about sprawl is that it is making China’s cities less “harmonious and liveable”, to use a phrase in vogue among the country’s city planners. Old neighbourhoods are being demolished, their inhabitants scattered into far-flung gated communities, commuting times are lengthening, car-dependence is growing and the spatial divide between rich and poor is widening. All this contributes to what officials call the country’s growing “urban disease”.
This article appeared in the Special report section of the print edition under the headline "People, not paving"