China Digital Times

Stories tagged with: cities (12)

• China Urged To Shift Urban Growth To Supercities

  

  From Reuters:

  Shifting China’s model of urbanization to favor huge supercities could boost per capita output, improve energy efficiency and help contain the loss of arable land, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) said on Monday.

  Rapid urbanization has been a major driver of Chinese growth over the past two decades and will become more so over the next 20 years; cities will account for 95 percent of China’s gross domestic product by 2025, up from 75 percent today, MGI said.

  But the institute, the economics research arm of consultants McKinsey & Co, said in a report that China could reap even greater economic benefits by adopting a more concentrated pattern of urban growth.

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  • March 24, 2008 2:17 AM

• Video: Abandoned Poison

  

  The following video from Sina won the 2006 Chinese DV Contest for environment protection. It tells us:

  “Two-thirds of the cities in China are filled with trash. According to reliable sources, there are about 150,000,000 tons of trash produced in cities every year. Most of the trash has been piled outdoors, which not only harms the image of the cities, but also pollutes the air, water and soil, which also affects our lives. It also becomes a threat to human health. The trash—abandoned poison—is one crucial obstacle for urban development in China.”

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  • February 16, 2008 8:31 PM

• China Building Gigantic Cities to Offset Rural Poverty - Howard W. French

  

  Howard French reports from Chongqing on the building of a megacity, which is attracting 200,000 new residents a year:

  China has built megacities before, of course.

  The country’s rich east abounds with them, strung along the coast from Tianjin in the north to Shenzhen in the far south like so many pearls.

  But the swift rise of Chongqing represents a departure: the fruits of a major push by the government in Beijing to spread the fruits of China’s economic boom to the country’s vast interior, home to three Chinese in four. A consensus has emerged among Beijing’s leadership that the way to ease poverty in the interior is to encourage people by the tens of millions to abandon the land for the cities. [Full text]

  See also a run-down on Chongqing’s Investment Zones from the All Roads Lead to China blog.

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  • May 30, 2007 10:20 AM

• China’s Urban Area Reaches 32,521 Kilometers - People’s Daily

  

  People’s Daily published some new statistics about China’s rapid urbanization:

  In recent years, Chinese cities have expanded rapidly with their urbanization rate rising steadily over the past half century from 29.04 percent in 1995 to 41.76 percent in 2004. The urban scale has enlarged quickly in the wake of growth in urban population. From 2000 to 2005, China’s completed urban areas rose from 22,439 square kilometers to 32,521 square km with the density of urban population increasing from 442 per sq km to 870 per sq km; and the residential housing space was up from 4.41 billion square kilometers to 10.77 billion square kilometers. [Full text]

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  • May 14, 2007 9:17 AM

• Looking beyond Beijing - Alex Frew McMillan

  

  Real estate developments expand to China’s “second-tier” cities, from International Herald Tribune:

  When a group of large institutional property companies gathered for a real estate conference in February, it was no accident that they met in Chongqing rather than Shanghai or Beijing.

  The topic of the meeting, “Second Tier and Beyond,” has been dominating recent discussions among real estate investors in China: the reach beyond the most-developed urban locations and into the so-called second-tier cities, mainly the country’s provincial capitals. And Chongqing, a river port in Sichuan Province, is the largest of these cities.

  China-watchers say they have noticed the idea gaining momentum for years, with the trend really advancing since 2005.[Full Text]

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  • April 5, 2007 3:48 PM

• Linfen, The World’s Most Polluted City

  

  The major mining city Linfen, Shaanxi, has been in the news lately, for a mining disaster and it’s other primary product: pollution. In February, the Globe and Mail posted an audio slideshow from Linfen, the world’s most polluted city. Watch and listen here. See also a Taiwan TV report on Linfen from earlier this year, via YouTube.

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  • April 1, 2007 9:44 PM

• China’s Best Investment Environment Cities Announced - People’s Daily

  

  From People’s Daily Online:

  The 2006 list of cities with the best investment environment was recently announced by the National Bureau of Statistics. Beijing, Tianjin and Shenyang took the first three places. Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou, Qingdao, Guangzhou and Shenzhen also ranked in the top ten.

  Zhang Weimin, the deputy director of the National Bureau of Statistics of China, said that the investment strategy in every area of China has been changing. The focus has shifted from quantity to quality, from investment volume to investment structure, from preferential policy competition to investment environment competition. The most important element of the investment environment has shifted from hardware construction to perfecting the software environment.[Full Text]

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  • December 11, 2006 10:26 PM

• Beijing not desirable place to live in - CRI

  

  From CRIENGLISH.com:

  Beijing, the nation’s capital, is still far from reaching the standards for China’s most suitable cities for living, with rising housing prices an important factor, according to a recent report.

  The findings were released in a blue book compiled by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (in Chinese) on Thursday after interviewing over 7,000 Beijing residents.

  …Based on urbanites’ degree of satisfaction with the city, the urban habitable index, which takes transportation, environment, health and security into account, averaged 63.8 out of 100 points. The basis for a desirable city to live in is 70 points. [Full Text]
  
  

  See also Xinhua’s “Poll shows Shanghai ‘most livable’ city”
  

  Technorati Tags: Beijing, China

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  • June 25, 2006 8:08 AM

• A Force Of Nature - Susan Jakes

  

  From Time Asia (link):

  In 1999, officials in the city of Zhongshan decided to tear down a shipyard and replace it with a park. The city, situated across the mouth of the Pearl River from Hong Kong, has a tradition of putting its wealth to good civic use: its tidy streets are adorned with banks of flowers and well-manicured trees, and it has racked up model-city awards from Beijing and the United Nations. But these shiny credentials presented a dilemma for local leaders”their political promotion would depend in part on outdoing their predecessors, and Zhongshan didn’t leave much room for improvement. So when the Yuezhong shipworks went bankrupt, it wasn’t long before plans emerged to remove an eyesore, cut ribbons and make progress.

  Yu Kongjian, China’s pre-eminent landscape architect, was brought down from Beijing to lend the project some cachet”and, as is often the case, his first move was to throw a wrench into other people’s plans.

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  • April 5, 2006 10:10 AM

• Invisible city - Jonathan Watts

  

  From the Guardian (link):

  Every year, 8.5 million Chinese peasants move into cities. Most of their destinations are mere specks on western maps, if they appear at all. But their populations put them on a par with some of the world’s megalopolises. Britain has five urban centres of more than a million people; China has ninety. A few - Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Nanjing - are well known around the world. The names of many others - Suqian, Suining, Xiantao, Xinghua, Liuan - are unfamiliar even to many Chinese. Nowhere is the staggering urbanisation of the world more evident than in Chongqing. Never heard of it? This is where the pace and scale of urbanisation is probably faster and bigger than anywhere in the world today. This is the Coketown of the early 21st century.

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  • March 14, 2006 9:11 PM

• Experts: China’s urban poverty worsens - Xinhua

  

  From Xinhua:

  Despite the country’s booming economy China’s urban poverty has worsened according to the China Youth Daily which quotes dozens of economists.

  The economists told the paper that the proportion of urban residents living in poverty is now higher than that of rural residents. The poverty rate in China’s cities is six to eight percent, which is higher than that in the countryside.

  The number of rural residents living in poverty fell from 250 million in 1978 to 26.1 million in 2004.

  Previously the urban poor were made up of those who were incapable of working but they now include many unemployed people, experts said.

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  • February 11, 2006 8:31 PM

• Beijing drops out of top 10 ‘best city’ list - Fu Jing

  

  From China Daily:

  Beijing may be the nation’s capital, but according to a recent survey, it does not even rank in China’s top 10 cities in terms of suitability for living.

  The city came 15th in the list, as compared to third in 2004, due to its bad traffic, high housing prices and heavy pollution.

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  • January 3, 2006 5:22 PM