China has already entered the middle-income stage of development, but the development is “unbalanced”, especially when it comes to the widening gap between town and country, Mr. Li said.

Disparity means potential, in other words, China’s biggest potential for development in the coming decades lies in the process of urbanization, he added.

[…] A UN report, titled Urban and Rural Areas 2011, predicted that nearly 70 percent of the population will live in urban areas by 2035. Over the next two decades China will build 20,000 to 50,000 new skyscrapers and more than 170 cities will require mass transit systems by 2025.

At The New York Times on Tuesday, however, Henry M. Paulson Jr. argued that China must rethink its approach to urbanisation.

A flawed system of municipal finance is driving debt, corruption and dissent, while unsustainable urban planning has yielded polluted cities that are destroying China’s ecosystem. Yet China’s future requires continued urbanization, which, absent a new approach, will only make the problem worse.

Cities can, however, be part of the solution: better urban policies can put China on a healthier path forward, economically and environmentally.

[…] Getting China’s urbanization right will matter to us all. Fortunately, many in China understand this, and cooperation with the United States government, corporate world and nonprofit sector, including my own research and advocacy institute, is bringing them the tools they need to prioritize design issues in their cities and adapt infrastructure plans now. These tools include instruction in sustainable practices for government leaders, public education in environmental issues and specialized training for the country’s urban planners.

China must adopt this new approach quickly, before vast infrastructure investment makes the current model irreversible. By 2025, China is projected to have a staggering 200 cities with populations over one million. America has just nine.

Widespread adoption of Paulson’s new approach may be some way off. The Financial Times’ Simon Rabinovitch noted this week that a 50-storey steel ring set to dominate Liaoning’s Shenfu New Town has attracted international derision for wasting resources and adding “little to no real social value”. The Guardian’s Jonathan Kaiman reported a twenty billion yuan scheme to level 700 mountains on the outskirts of Gansu’s provincial capital, Lanzhou, despite grave doubts about the financial viability and environmental sustainability of plans for the site. Lanzhou was rated China’s most polluted city in a 2011 air quality survey by the World Health Organisation.

Liu Fuyuan, a former high-level official at the country’s National Development and Reform Commission, told China Economic Weekly that the project was unsuitable because Lanzhou is frequently listed as among China’s most chronically water-scarce municipalities. “The most important thing is to gather people in places where there is water,” he said.

Others also pointed to the financial risk of building a new city in the middle of the desert. “All this investment needs to be paid back with residential land revenue, and I don’t see much on returns in these kinds of cities,” said Tao Ran, an economics professor at Renmin University in Beijing. “If you have a booming real estate market it might work, but it seems to me that real estate in China is very, very risky.”

In an email interview, a China Pacific Construction Group spokeswoman dismissed criticisms of the project as unjustified. “Lanzhou’s environment is already really poor, it’s all desolate mountains which are extremely short of water,” said Angie Wong. “Our protective style of development will divert water to the area, achieve reforestation and make things better than before.”

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Post tags: cities, deserts, Gansu, Lanzhou, Li Keqiang, Liaoning, real estate, urban development, urbanization, water supply
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“It is a complicated job,” Ma said. First, people must use heavy machines to roll and level the sand dunes in preparation for planting and then create checkerboards with straw to hold sand. After drilling wells and fetching water, planting shrubs in the checkerboards is the last step.

According to Ma, it is difficult to get enough water by drilling wells because the annual precipitation in the area is only 100 mm and the groundwater level is descending every year.

In order to solve the problem, Dengkou launched a project to introduce water into the desert from the Yellow River, the second longest river in China.

“The project started from July last year, planning to channel 76 million cubic meters of water every year to the desert from the Yellow River,” Ma said ….

In the last 10 years, Dengkou has brought more than 130,000 hectares of the desert under control, forging a 52-km-long green belt on the east edge of the desert and growing many kinds of drought-resistant plants, including saxauls, seabuckthorn, salix and oleaster, Ma said.

Any victory against the sand must, however, be weighed against its cost to a river so heavily exploited that in the 1990s it frequently failed to reach the sea.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: deserts, Inner Mongolia, water, Yellow River
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In recognition of the grave perils of increasing desertification, the United Nations has declared 2006 the International Year of Deserts and Desertification and the theme of World Environment Day on June 5, 2006 is, “Don’t Desert Drylands!”. Deserts and other dryland ecosystems now cover a third of the Earth’s land surface, and worsening land degradation puts more than a billion people in over 100 countries at risk of poverty, political instability, and other related effects. In China, desertification threatens to uproot growing numbers of residents from their homes and livelihoods. In the country’s arid north, the Mongolian Desert is rapidly encroaching on Shenyang, an industrial city of more than 40 million people; today, the distance between city and desert has shrunk to only 48 kilometers, down from 100 kilometers in 2000.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: desertification, deserts, land degradation
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