Source: TIME MagazineAddress:http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1713336,00.htmlProvided by: HaydenThe Short March
Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008 By BILL POWELL/SHANGHAI On a cold, gray afternoon a year ago, I stood on the deck of our newly purchased, half-constructed house about an hour outside Shanghai, wondering what, exactly, I had gotten myself into. My wife, a Shanghai native, and I had moved back to China from New York City in the spring of 2004, and 21⁄2 years later we had decided to take the plunge. We bought a three-story, five-bedroom townhouse way out in the suburbs, in a town called New Songjiang, a place that was then — and remains now — very much a work in progress.
We had come here that day to see how construction was progressing. Our house, along with about 140 others, was going up in a development called Emerald Riverside. It sits on the banks of a tributary that dumps into the Huangpu, the river that cuts Shanghai in two about 28 miles (45 km) to the northeast. On that dreary afternoon I gazed out to the other side of the river, looking at the only significant patch of land for miles that was not yet being developed — about five acres (20,000 sq m) of green that local farmers still used to grow watermelons, which they then sold to the migrant workers building this town. On the far bank there was a ramshackle one-room brick house, where three of the farmers lived — a husband, wife and teenage son. They had no running water — they bathed and washed their clothes in the river — and the place was lit by a single bulb. In every direction just beyond the watermelon patch, office parks and houses and apartment complexes were going up, forming a cordon around the farmland that was drawing inexorably tighter. As it is in vast swathes of China, the new was replacing the old, and it was not doing so slowly. It was doing so in the blink of an eye.
I stood on the deck that day and watched one of the farmers who worked the watermelon patch, an older woman who would later introduce herself to us as Liu Yi, as she stared back at me across the river. I remember thinking to myself, My god, what must be going through her mind? Not only is the land she works on about to disappear, but there's this foreigner standing over there staring at her. Where did he come from and, more to the point, what in the world is he doing out here? The short answer is that my wife and I have become a tiny part of China's latest revolution. We got an off-the-shelf mortgage from the Standard Chartered Bank branch in town, plunked down 25% of the purchase price, and bought ourselves a piece of the Great Chinese Dream.
For the past decade and a half, the frantic pace of urbanization has been the transformative engine driving this country's economy, as some 300-400 million people from dirt-poor farming regions made their way to relative prosperity in cities. Within the contours of that great migration, however, there is another one now about to take place — less visible, but arguably no less powerful. As China's major cities — there are now 49 with populations of one million or more, compared with nine in the U.S. in 2000 — become more crowded and more expensive, a phenomenon similar to the one that reshaped the U.S. in the aftermath of World War II has begun to take hold. That is the inevitable desire among a rapidly expanding middle class for a little bit more room to live, at a reasonable price; maybe a little patch of grass for children to play on, or a whiff of cleaner air as the country's cities become ever more polluted.
This is China's Short March. A wave of those who are newly affluent and firm in the belief that their best days, economically speaking, are ahead of them, is headed for the suburbs. In Shanghai alone, urban planners believe some 5 million people will move to what are called "satellite cities" in the next 10 years. To varying degrees, the same thing is happening all across China. This process — China's own suburban flight — is at the core of the next phase of this country's development, and will be for years to come.
The consequences of this suburbanization are enormous. Think of how the U.S. was transformed, economically and socially, in the years after World War II, when GIs returned home and formed families that then fanned out to the suburbs. The comparison is not exact, of course, but it's compelling enough. The effects of China's suburbanization are just beginning to ripple across Chinese society and the global economy. It's easy to understand the persistent strength in commodity prices — steel, copper, lumber, oil — when you realize that in Emerald Riverside construction crews used more than three tons of steel in the houses and nearly a quarter of a ton of copper wiring. There are 35 housing developments either just finished or still under construction in New Songjiang alone, a town in which 500,000 people will eventually live. And as Lu Hongjiang, a vice president of the New Songjiang Development & Construction company puts it, "we're only at the very beginning of this in China."
Commentary by
Hayden:
I chose this article to show the path of developmennt of China. And from the article, we can see the obvious signs that China is following the same model as America in it's path of development. However, CHina is seeing such signs before the country is fully developed. THis will lead to severe implicaitons in terms of social as well as envoronmental problems. Suburbanisation is taking place in the rich cities of Beijing and Shanghai where the rich ar emoving out of the city and the poor are either in the rural areas or stranded in the slums in the inner city. Such a problem has to be addressed as sooon as possible.
Labels: articles, China, Cities, Posts by Hayden, Urban dynamics
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