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Making cities liveable

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-21 08:26

Urbanization is believed to be an inevitable process in changing the lives of large numbers of poverty-stricken rural residents. It has indeed prompted the largest ever migration of people from rural to urban areas in the past three decades. But, while the process has to continue, enough attention needs to be paid to its attending problems.

The number of urban dwellers that made up only 21 percent of the country's total population has increased to 45 percent in 25 years, and the ratio is expected to rise to 60 percent in another 20 years, turning China from an agricultural country into an industrial one.

Among other things, it must be ensured that agriculture does not fall victim to this process.

The increasingly tightened control by the central government of the use of arable land for non-agricultural use and its repeated call for keeping total arable land at no less than 120 million hectares send a clear message that urbanization must never be achieved at the cost of the country's food security.

What is equally important is that the rural residents staying back to farm their land must have more income from growing crops. Their living standards too have to be improved at least as much as those of their counterparts who have moved to cities. This is necessary to ensure that the rural people's enthusiasm for farming is not be dampened. The national campaign to build the new socialist countryside is meant to do precisely this.

But repeated land use violations and exposed infringements on the interests and rights of rural villagers by some local governments suggest that more efforts are needed to further promote agricultural development during the process of urbanization.

Urbanization should never be attained at the expense of city environment or services.

The pressure on housing is so great in cities that some have just developed themselves into clusters of high-rises like beehives without enough open space for greenery and for residents' outdoor activities. Some drainage systems are built in such haste that streets are inundated during rainstorms.

That newly paved roads are so frequently dug out for fixing public utility pipes in some cities is a sign of how poorly these cities are managed.

With the total number of cities rising to 655 and of towns to 20,000 by the end of last year and their further expansions in the coming two decades, managing these cities in an efficient manner remains a challenge in the years to come.

(China Daily 08/21/2008 page10)