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Chongqing, China’s city on the move

Pallavi Aiyar

Rising up from the hills that line the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialiang Rivers in southwest China is one of the largest urban agglomerations in the world. Yet few in the world have heard of Chongqing — a municipality that is home to 32 million people, more than the populations of Peru or Australia. Driving into the municipality’s metropolitan centre from the newly renovated international airport, billboards for luxury villa-style developments dot the road . “Palm Springs: Life is a Status” reads one.

In the city proper, a ceaseless aural assault awaits. Through the haze of the pollution that almost perennially blankets Chongqing, the vrooming of motorbikes clashes with the churning of cement mixers. The sizzle of spicy noodles being ladled out, the creak of cranes, the heavy thud of wrecking balls: everywhere the sounds of trade and movement, of the old giving way to the new, abound.

Chongqing is clearly a city on the move — upward and forward — and on a scale that is breathtaking. It is also a city that more than any other exemplifies in dramatic relief the broader issues that characterise the contemporary Chinese condition such as urbanisation, industrial development, inequalities, dislocation, and chronic pollution.

Given its location in the middle reaches of the Yangtze, Chongqing has historically been a trading hub for the landlocked and impoverished expanses of western China. Its fortunes took a dramatic turn in 1997 when it was separated from Sichuan province and given the quasi-provincial status of an independent municipality, somewhat like a union territory in the Indian context. Since then Chongqing has urbanised at a frantic pace, becoming the fastest growing urban centre on the planet, absorbing some half a million people into its cities every year.

The core 500-square-kilometre area of Chongqing’s main city, which the municipality’s urban planners refer to as the megalopolis, is home to six million inhabitants. But the megalopolis is expanding in size almost daily, swallowing up surrounding areas of what was once countryside into a single gigantic conurbation already comprising around 10 million people. According to Chongqing’s Vice Mayor Huang Qifan, by 2020 another 10 million farmers are expected to move to cities taking Chongqing’s total urban population to a mind-blowing 22 million.

In mid-June, Chongqing was nominated by China’s central government as a pilot for “coordinated rural and urban” development. The idea behind the pilot is for the 82,000-square-kilometre municipality to experiment with doing away with the distinctions between the rural and urban populace that have characterised China. From the 1950s, rural residents in China were barred from travel to and residence in urban centres, enabling city-dwellers to enjoy a cocooned and privileged existence including access to better education and hospitals. Even today, despite the relaxation to a large degree of these strictures, the urban-rural divide in China is dramatic. In Chongqing alone, the per capita income of urban residents in 2006 was RMB 11,500 ($1,500), some four times more than the RMB 2,875 ($375) for the rural areas.

Across China, income and regional inequalities have become focal points for the coalescing of an array of discontentments resulting from the economic restructuring the country has undertaken over the last 30 years. China’ Communist Party has begun to make tackling inequalities a policy priority, emphasising social justice and equity over sheer growth.

However, Chongqing’s strategy on how it plans to achieve the goals set for it by the centre is revealing. Mr. Huang, the Vice Mayor, says that rather than focussing on developing rural areas, the municipal government will aim its energies squarely on “helping farmers to become city dwellers” and building a “stronger and bigger city.” The municipality wants to develop what it calls a “one-hour economy circle,” agglomerating all the satellite towns and villages within an hour’s driving distance of the main city into a gigantic whole. The local authorities are thus enticing peasants to give up leases on their rural plots of land in exchange for urban residency permits that offer access to schools, hospitals, and other social services that were once out of reach for farmers.

Mr. Huang admits that achieving the municipality’s urbanisation goals will require Herculean efforts entailing provisions for housing, pensions, education, and sanitation for literally millions of newcomers. But the Vice Mayor is nonetheless confident that the authorities are up to the task. “There will be no slums in Chongqing unlike India or Brazil,” he boasts.

The primary reason for his confidence, he says, is Chongqing’s rapid economic growth, which in the first six months of this year touched 14 per cent. “The important thing is that our city can provide jobs for all the new arrivals,” he explains adding that housing and other infrastructure are being developed at a pace that matches the rate of urbanisation.

Chongqing will spend RMB 650 billion ($84.4 billion) over the next five years on industrial development, Mr. Huang reveals, aimed at transforming the municipality into the primary industrial base in China’s west. Another RMB 600 billion ($78 billion) will be spent on expressways, water treatment facilities, sewage, railroads, and port development.

Already the city adds around 137,000 square metres of new floor space for residential blocks, offices, and shopping malls every day. With a GDP of RMB 348.62 billion ($45.2 billion) in 2006, the municipality boasts of 1,000 kilometres of expressways, 1,500 kilometres of railroads, ports with the capacity to handle 60 million tonnes of cargo, and an airport that welcomes some 10 million passengers a year.

Clearly Chongqing’s road map for achieving the target of “coordinated” rural-urban development does not quite match what most analysts claim Beijing’s current policy priority of building a “new socialist countryside” to be. Rather than slowing down growth in the cities and distributing the gains of urban development to the countryside by concentrating on investment in health, education, and pensions, Chongqing’s plan is to speed up economic growth so that the momentum of development can support rapid urbanisation.

During his two-hour-long interaction with journalists, Chongqing’s Vice Mayor barely mentioned public health or the environment — the current buzz words in Beijing. Instead, his focus remained on old-style parameters such as FDI and infrastructure. Much of the economic buoyancy that attracts hundreds of thousands of migrants to Chongqing has resulted from large-scale economic reforms that have in the last 10 years seen the share of the private sector in the municipality’s economy grow from 25 per cent to well over half. As a result, industrial sales have quadrupled over the same period.

However, as elsewhere in China, economic reforms such as the streamlining of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have created painful social dislocations in the city, exacerbated by the disruptions caused by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project. A number of demonstrations have broken out across Chongqing in recent years with demonstrators protesting layoffs at SOEs, forced relocations, and illegal land grabs. However, possibly the biggest social and economic cost of Chongqing’s urbanisation and industrialisation has come from chronic pollution.

Wu Dengming, the founder of the Green Volunteer League, talks about the pollution caused by Strontium mines in the municipality’s Tongliang county, where contamination of water sources is believed to have caused a sharp spike in cancer rates in addition to the death of farm animals. Mr. Wu has helped some of the villagers organise and petition the government with a degree of success. Several of the chemical factories and mines in the area have thus closed following his whistle-blowing undertakings. However, protection from certain local officials allows other factories to continue operating in flagrant violation of pollution norms even today, Mr. Wu says.

But he adds that the last five years or so have seen some improvement in terms of the government’s commitment to the environment. The amount of coal being used in the municipality has decreased by 10 million tonnes since 2000 and the city has also built huge disposal plants for the 3,500 tonnes of garbage generated in the metropolitan area every day.

Mr. Wu is sitting in a restaurant in a new riverside development called Hong Ya Dong, the gathering place for Chongqing’s hipsters and new rich. The complex houses a Star Bucks coffee house, designer boutiques, and a four-star hotel. In the parking lot outside the restaurant, a Jaguar is parked across from a BMW SUV. Closer to the river, several porters, locally known as bang bang men after the bamboo poles (called bang bang) and ropes they use to haul goods up and down the city’s hilly roads on their shoulders, slouch around. It’s night time now and Chongqing’s Hong Kong-like skyline is lit up in a blaze of neon.

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