Urbanization and China

China and Urbanization

What are the three main reasons urbanization was limited between 1949 and 1980 in China?

First, according to professor Kenneth a. Small of University of California at Irving, "During the Mao era, urbanization was often suppressed"; also, Small writes that in that era developing in the eastern coastal cities was discouraged for "military reasons" (Small, 2002, p. 3). A recent article in the Harvard Political Review (Huang, 2011) suggests that autocratic regimes like China are "more easily threatened" by huge masses of people in cities. The author also references a research document by Jeremy Wallace of Stanford University ("Cities and Stability: Urbanization and Non-Democratic Regime Survival") in which Wallace asserts, "urbanization hinders autocratic regime survival." The rationale behind that statement, Huang writes, is that when masses of people jam the cities they can "…more easily threaten autocratic regimes due to their proximity to seats of government" (p. 1).

Guoming Wen writes in the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation site that China's big concern is for "social stability" in the nation of 1.3 billion people. "Uncontrolled urbanization causes many farmers to flock to cities in a short period of time," Wen explains (Wen, 2007). Having rural people moving to the city so quickly "…not only imposes pressures on city infrastructures, but also causes potential social problems," Wen continues. In fact, if too many newly immigrated "city citizens" are not properly educated and "cannot find jobs, they may be more likely to commit suicide," Wen concludes; Wen adds that the "criminal who were immigrants account for over 50% of the total criminals in Shanghai, and 80% in Guangzhou."

Meanwhile, in R.J.R. Kirkby's book, Urbanization in China, the author explains that the most "common sense explanation" for China's "supposed anti-urbanism" in the post-1949 era "lies in the means to state power taken by the Chinese Communist Party" (Kirkby, 1985, p. 4). What he means by that is that the Chinese Communists are different than the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, who used the "industrial proletariat" for their revolution. In China, the communists owed their ascendancy to power to the "massed ranks of the peasantry," so it was "only natural" that the communists would show "a leaning" towards the rural China and its peasantry (Kirkby, p. 4). Mao himself hailed from "peasant stock," Kirkby explains. Moreover, the "Great Leap Forward" was a negative response to "urban-centered planning strategies; and the "Cultural Revolution" involved the "excision of tens of millions of urban educated from the cities" in an effort to "dissipate the new and threatening forces of urban-based elitism" (Kirkby, p. 5).

As to what tasks the government has taken regarding urbanization since 1949, Article 10 of the 1958 law ordered each residence to have a "hukou bu" (permanent registration booklet) designed to "anchor people to their native places," Kirkby writes, and to "prevent unauthorized movement" into cities (p. 25). In 1978 China ushered in an "open policy" which was followed by a big increase in the urbanization. A United Nations University article states that the "regional distribution of the urbanization level I still similar" to what was happening prior to the open policy and economic reforms (http://unu.edu). Why? The provincial variation in the urbanization level in China "is positively related to per capita economic output, industrialization level, and land area," and it is "negatively related to population density" (http://unu.edu). Challenges faced by China: a) "Widespread pollution problems and a tidal wave of migration" hitting China's cities; b) "More than 170 cities will need mass transit systems by 2025"; and c) entirely new forms of infrastructure and security frameworks" will be needed (www.asiaone.com).