A tale of two cities
Every time Zhang Ying returns to his hometown, his old friends take him on a grand tour of the city in case he gets lost when driving alone. "I come back to Chongqing at least once a year since I left in 1997. But I still find myself to be a stranger to the city; it is changing so fast," says the 28-year-old PhD from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Chongqing is getting a face-lift as more and more old buildings (right) are replaced by high-rises (left). File photos |
Soon after Chongqing was announced as China's fourth municipality in 1997, Zhang left his hometown to study at Nanjing University. From there, he went to Chicago to conduct academic research.
Over the past decade, his hometown has undergone an expensive, comprehensive face-lift.
In 1997, Chongqing was carved out of Sichuan Province to make the largest and most populous municipality in China - and the only such metropolis in underdeveloped West China. Today, with 31 million people - including 20 million peasants in the suburbs - populating the 82,400-square-kilometer municipality, Chongqing is said to be the world's largest city.
To support the Go West initiative, Beijing has poured billions of dollars into Chongqing's infrastructure and has developed a plan to make it the "Gateway to the West". By 2010, $23 billion will have been spent on 105 major infrastructure projects, including 33 bridges, eight highways, nine railways, a light rail network, a container port and an airport terminal, according to officials.
Last year, more than 3,000 urban planning projects in the "city proper" were examined and approved. That is about 80 per day, says Jiang Yong, Director of Chongqing Urban Planning Bureau. The number of projects is surpassed only by Beijing.
Newcomers would easily get lost in the newly formed labyrinth of streets and bridges. "So many new roads are being built; some are completed and some still under construction. It's quite confusing," says 45-year-old Liu Xuequan, who has been a taxi driver in the city for more than a decade.
"When all of this construction finishes, the road conditions and city traffic will be much better. And it will save a lot of time. Time is money," Liu says.
Local officials are proud of the rapid changes made to Chongqing's cityscape. "The map of Chongqing is updated every three months," mayor Wang Hongju says.
The people's liberation monument Jiefangbei - once the landmark of the area - is now dwarfed by dozens of newly constructed skyscrapers. At only 1 square kilometer, the business zone is home to more than 4,400 shops, 20 department stores, 100 financial agencies and 500 restaurants.
Hong Kong developer Vincent Lo, who was one of the masterminds of Shanghai's Xintiandi, will invest $1.2 billion in the suburban Hualongqiao area along the Jialing River. Lo plans to build the "largest manufacturing service center in Western China".
Chongqing Tiandi will feature a man-made lake, a 98-floor building, residential blocks, yuppie restaurants and boutiques.
"Strolling around Jiefangbei, sometimes I feel as if I am walking in Manhattan," says Zhang, who lived in the United States for about five years.
"When I look at the night scenery of the city from the Nanshan Mountain, it looks as charming as that of Hong Kong. But most foreign experts believe Chongqing is 'China's Chicago'."
Located in the middle and upper reaches of Yangtze River at the head of the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam, Chongqing is slated to become the trading gateway for China's remote western provinces, which are brimming with rich natural resources and vast cheap labor.
When the dam is completed in 2009, large oceangoing cargo ships will be able to reach Chongqing for the first time. The city will spearhead the economic development in the Wild West in the way Chicago did in the United States in the 19th century.
But Chongqing is facing the unprecedented challenge of coordinating rural and urban development in such a large city. Chongqing is in fact a combination of a big city and an even bigger countryside, with 80 percent of its population living in rural areas.
Unbalanced economic development has created the huge gap between urban and rural residents, especially in terms of income, social welfare and education. In Chongqing, the per capita GDP of urbanites is 10 times of that of people from remote areas.
Over the past decade, the rapid improvement in public infrastructure has helped speed up the rate of urbanization to 43 percent from 33 percent in 1997.
On June 10, Chongqing and Chengdu were selected as pilot cities for reform targeting coordinated rural and urban development through reforms in all sectors. They became new experimental areas, following southern Shenzhen, eastern Shanghai's Pudong New Area and northern Tianjin's Binhai New Area.
"In 10 years, the size of our 'city proper' will continue to grow," says Jiang, the urban planning official. By 2020, the urban area will grow from 1,356 square kilometers to 1,500, while the number of urban residents will increase from 16 million to 22 million - about 65 percent of Chongqing's population, he says.
"I am thinking of moving back to Chongqing in few years," Zhang says. "I am quite impressed by its booming economy and increasingly attractive landscape."
(China Daily 06/21/2007 page23)
