Richard Hu, a professor at the Canberra Business School, looks at the changes in China’s cities since 2010 and dares to make some bold predictions about the future. In the past, Hu has written about Shenzhen as well as comparing Chinese cities to the rapid urban growth in other Asian countries. Now, his book Reinventing the Chinese City (Columbia University Press) is available and perhaps points the way to the urban future in China.

Read on for Paul French’s conversation with the author …

At the start of the book, you posit the question of whether China is now entering a new era of urbanisation. Is this the case, and how do you define this new era? And, as you also ask, is the current urban transformation leading to a new normal or following an old path?

China’s urbanisation is entering a new era. After four decades of growth at a speed and scale unprecedented in human history, China’s urbanisation is now transitioning into a stage of post-growth. This new era of urbanisation is characterised by a pursuit of qualitative upgrading to replace the previous one of quantitative growth. This shift is reflected in policy priorities like ‘new-type urbanisation’ and ‘high-quality development’, which the Chinese government has put in place in the recent decade.

This shift from growth to post-growth is reshaping China’s urban policy and planning system. It is also likely to reshape urban development approaches in the coming decades. Green, smart, and innovative, among other notions, are the keywords underpinning this shift. This shift is a long-term process spanning through the middle of the 21st century. If these are going to happen as planned and aspired, they will lead to a new normal of Chinese-style urbanisation. But the process will not be smooth. It will fluctuate among the tug-of-war between the new normal and the old path, and between imagination and reality.

You note the emergence of a ‘state-led green revolution’ in Chinese cities and use Beijing as a case study in your book. Do you think China can overcome the difficulty of maintaining growth and greening its cities?

The Chinese government vowed to achieve both modernisation and decarbonisation by the mid-21st century. These are promises made to people within China and in the world. Both goals require specificity and clear roadmaps. However, they embed an intrinsic paradox: many aspects of achieving them are contradictory rather than balanced in the current circumstance. This paradox is a challenge. It also creates a great aspiration for achieving them through innovation or through developing ‘new quality productive forces’, a key word of China’s two congresses just completed in March 2024.

History does not seem to suggest an optimistic outlook. Numerous eco-city programmes were proposed and endorsed before. Some did not achieve the eco outcomes, although they were propagated as eco projects. Hopefully, these unfulfilled projects can offer some lessons to be learnt. However, it should also be acknowledged that Chinese cities have made great achievements in addressing environmental degradation and improving air quality in the recent decade, largely thanks to the green revolution underway. Both lessons and best practices can be drawn to inform a reconciliation of the growth and greening of Chinese cities.

You focus in on Hangzhou to look at the smart city movement in China. Can you tell us what this is and why Hangzhou is an important example?

Hangzhou is an emerging star city in the Chinese and global urban systems. The city’s transformation is swift, agile, and smart. Despite being under the shadow of Shanghai in the Yangtze River delta region, Hangzhou has been searching for an alternative path of urban development, drawing upon its local assets, regional context and national positioning.

Hangzhou has well utilised the opportunities of digital technologies to drive its transformation. The entrepreneurs and enterprises capitalising on digital technologies are home-grown in the city. These innovation factors are fused with a local milieu that is conducive to their emergence and growth.

Hangzhou is an important example in that the city’s transformation has been unplanned. It is more an outcome of bottom-up ingenuity, local entrepreneurship, and market forces than top-down planning. Hangzhou showcases the importance of market forces in enhancing a city’s exploitation of and adaptability to the ‘new quality productive forces’ the Chinese government is aspiring to.

You’ve also looked closely at China’s newest city, Xiong’an in Hebei, and how well it has learnt from the lessons of past urbanisation. How’s that experiment going?

The vision for Xiong’an is the opposite of many problems of past urbanisation. Obviously, lessons are learned in the imagining of the new city that has been drawn and is being developed from scratch.

Xiong’an is 100km away from Beijing and is meant to decentralise certain urban functions from the capital to address its big city syndrome – pollution, congestion and urban development pressures. It also aims to rebalance the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region, where Beijing dominates while the other cities are less developed. In the long run, it is planned to be a city of five million people. This bold idea must await the test of time.

It has been seven years since Xiong’an was announced as a new city in April 2017. Its planning has been completed. The progress of infrastructure and early construction is impressive. Although it is largely a construction site at present, the constructed area has started to look like a city. So far, the construction has been based on state investment. It is not clear yet how this state project will sustain its strategic growth through engaging market forces.

Another issue of concern is the indigenous residents who are displaced by the state project. They are urbanised, passively, at the cost of their rural household sites and farmland. How they are surviving in and adapting to an instant city presents a challenge.

Obviously, Hong Kong has historically had a special role for British businesspeople, yet the place has changed so much, and its future role is far from certain. What are your conclusions regarding Hong Kong and the likelihood it will remain a place foreign business people feel comfortable operating in?

Since 2019, Hong Kong has experienced the most drastic changes since its return in 1997. It is increasingly integrated with the regional development of the Greater Bay Area and the national development. This process started before 2019, but it has been explicitly accelerated since then. The development of the Greater Bay Area has been elevated into a national strategy, enhancing the complementarity and fusion of Hong Kong and its neighbouring city Shenzhen and other major cities like Guangzhou in the region.

Hong Kong has played a prime gateway role in the Mainland’s reform and opening-up since the late 1970s. With the rise of other Chinese cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen, this gateway role has been downplayed in the national urban system. However, Hong Kong still has its advantages that other Chinese cities do not have: international connections, talent, its legal system and environment for doing business. Hong Kong’s competitiveness is its bridging role in connecting China and the world. This role is unique to Hong Kong, providing it with opportunities that no other city ­in China or overseas can access.

You have a chapter entitled ‘Imaging 2035 and Beyond’ – it’s always bold to make predictions, but would you care to share with us a few predictions on what China’s cities may start to look like in 2035…and beyond?

The year 2035 is only a bit more than one decade away. It is a benchmark year in the current strategies for almost all Chinese cities since as it is aligned with the Chinese government’s goal of achieving ‘basic’ modernisation by then. Urbanisation is integral to China’s modernisation, in history and in future. By 2035, China will become a highly urbanised society with around 75% of its population living in cities based on assumptions of its urbanisation in the past and at present. Urbanisation will continue to drive China’s economic growth and socioeconomic transformation.

China’s urbanisation will take new forms in the coming decades. One of them is an emerging urban structure of mega regions. Each of these mega regions (like the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region, Yangtze River delta region, and Greater Bay Area, and numerous regions of smaller sizes) comprises a chain of cities that are linked by transport infrastructure and mobility of factors of production, forging a regional economy and market. Mega regional development creates new opportunities for integrated, balanced development of cities across a region. It also raises important issues of mega regional planning and governance to enable regional development that is now unbalanced and fragmented.

Photo by Zhang Kaiyv on Unsplash

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Providing some great perspectives on the process of urbanisation in China is China Urbanising: Impacts and Transitions (University of Pennsylvania Press), edited by Weiping Wu and Qin Gao, both professors at Columbia University.

The book gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars to capture the phenomenon of urbanisation in its historical and regional variations, and explores its impact on China’s socioeconomic welfare, environment and resources, urban form and lifestyle, and population and health. It also provides new ways to understand the transitions underway and the gravity of the progress, particularly in the context of demographic shifts and climate change. Paul French caught up with editor Weiping Wu to dig a little deeper into their findings.

Where is urbanisation at right now in China in percentage terms? You speak of ‘maturity’ and even the prospect of ‘contraction’ in the introduction to the essays in the collection; do you think the urbanisation rate has peaked or will cities still continue to grow?

Over 700 million people live in cities now in China – about 65% of the country’s population – with another 200-300 million more expected to urbanise in the next decade or so. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the number of cities increased from 213 in 1979 to 685 in 2020. With economic growth slowing down after the 2008-2009 global recession and during the Covid-19 pandemic, the urban sector is showing signs of maturity and, in some cases, contraction, with mounting building vacancies in interior cities and local debts across the regions. Compounding this new economic and fiscal geography is the demographic transition already underway. Before China gets rich, it is getting old, with an unprecedentedly ageing population, particularly in cities where the country’s prior one-child policy was enforced most effectively.

Nonetheless, there is still room for continued urbanisation. Historically, the rate of urbanisation begins to level off at around 75-80% among many industrialised countries. While migration has been the key driving force so far in China, and its magnitude has stabilised during the recent decade, in-situ urbanisation – i.e., places transitioning from rural to urban conditions – will likely push up the urbanisation rate.

Does the demographic shift we’re seeing in China mean cities will be increasingly older spaces that are less focused on the young and their needs and more on the elderly and their requirements?

The rapidly ageing population presents a major challenge for urban China. One in every four Chinese people will be aged above 65 by 2050, according to official projections. Large cities like Shanghai are about 20 years ahead of the national ageing trend, witnessing a phenomenon similar to that in countries with substantially higher income levels. Smaller urban family sizes, less-flexible housing, and increased numbers of women in the workplace means that the family can no longer be relied upon as the primary safety net for the elderly in urban China. A growing number of retirees demand a better pension system as well as housing and medical benefits (Wu and Gaubatz 2020).

Cities are experimenting with new ways of accommodating and caring for the older population in residential settings. There has been a significant expansion in nursing homes, with about 22 times more nursing homes today than there were in 1978. Three new institutions – “eldercare institutions”, which provide residential care outside the family; “institutions for paying respect to older adults” and “institutions for providing care for older adults” – have been designed for low-income older residents as a form of social welfare. Two other institutional types – “senior apartments” and “nursing homes” – target wealthier elderly. While institutionalisation is a continued priority as a main mechanism for accommodating older residents, some local governments have begun to focus on ageing-in-place options.

You also speak of the ‘incomplete path to urbanisation’ – mass migration from the countryside to cities but not always with full rights and access for migrants. This has clearly created a layer of urban poor – what is their current situation, and do you see it improving?

Migrant workers are highly desired for the full functioning of the urban economy, but their presence in cities is generally unwanted. This ambiguous position has been constructed not only through exclusionary institutions (especially the household registration, or hukou, system) but also through the volatile and circulatory nature of migratory flows in China. The resulting “incomplete urbanisation” restrains economic growth as much as it enables it by keeping migrants intentionally disengaged from much of the formal urban economy. The volatility of export manufacturing contributes to the temporary presence of rural migrants and the incomplete integration of this population into cities more broadly. Therefore swings in the global economy directly affect the livelihood of migrants. While the role of the hukou has diminished in small cities and towns, it continues to restrict rural migrants from accessing state-provided social housing, state employment, public education, and other services in large cities. Hukou-based exclusion has fuelled the proliferation of secondary, and most often informal, housing and service markets of considerable size.

Since population mobility first increased in the early 1980s, the migrant population and their outcomes have become more diverse. Some have gained access to limited benefits in the city by signing employment contracts with urban enterprises. Others with capital and skills have found better-paid employment and prospered. Those making the gains tend to be urban-urban migrants, who are better educated and affiliated with state-owned enterprises. The more positive change is that it has become much easier to stay and work in urban areas for an extended time, while in general, policy responses toward rural migrants have slowly moved in a more humane direction. As a result, their experience in the urban labour markets – the subject of study in the chapter by Li and Wu in this edited volume – improved: more choices in urban employment, more opportunities to enter high-end service industries, and more potential to choose white-collar occupations. Their wages increased rapidly as well, although the wage growth of well-educated rural migrant workers or higher-income groups exceeded that of less-educated ones or lower-income groups.

Is the current level of urbanisation in any way sustainable in a world that cares about climate change? Are China’s cities hopelessly contributing to the problem or potentially a solution?

Although considerably smaller and less modern, the Chinese city under state socialism (1949-1979) was, in many ways, more socially and environmentally sustainable than today. By comparison, reform-era urban residents’ residential and transportation choices are vastly more energy intensive. Aside from the effect of rising income and increasing mobility, the urban landscape is moving away from the compact and pedestrian-oriented cities of the Mao era. This retreat from sustainable forms of urbanism presents a paradoxically regressive circumstance of urbanisation, further aggravated by a new type of privatised urban development known as superblocks in which massive plots of urban or peri-urban land are developed by a single private developer. There is evidence that residents living in a superblock consume more transportation energy, travel greater distances, and have higher rates of private car ownership.

On a more positive note, China’s rising role in the global discourse on climate change has generated marked progress in how cities interact with the environment and planet. Cities, as places with concentrated environmental impacts, are a primary focus of environmental planning in China. Just as establishing Special Economic Zones in the 1980s led to the near-ubiquity of development zones in cities, the hope is that an ever-widening set of ecological demonstration projects, from targeted regulatory practices to the construction of completely new cities, will normalise sustainable urbanism. Today, over 80% of prefecture-level cities have some form of eco-city project underway.

Are there any viable alternatives to mass urbanisation in China? For example, are satellite towns and garden suburbs being trialled or thought about at all?

History, location, economies of scale and policy preferences have contributed to the relative success of large cities in China. A network of urban areas surrounding a central large city reinforces agglomeration economies, as in the case of the Lower Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta regions. Together, these regions command the lion’s share of China’s urban economy. Additional in-situ urbanisation, particularly from the integration of peri-urban and satellite towns into metropolitan economies, offers further scope for increased urbanisation. However, cities also do not achieve full agglomeration economies; in fact, a majority of Chinese cities have decreasing levels of population density. There is considerable opportunity for increased efficiency and scope in cities in both coastal and interior regions. With an already intense population-to-land ratio, following the path of urban sprawl, as seen in some industrialised countries, really is not an option for China’s cities.

Could you perhaps speculate on a few future trends we may see emerging in China’s urbanisation phenomenon?

First, while Chinese cities are undergoing an economic, social, and spatial transformation resembling what we have seen elsewhere, parts of their trajectory clearly push the limits of contemporary urban theories and experience. Certain characteristics of China’s urban transformation have produced conditions contradictory to progress, such as increasing inequality, socio-spatial stratification, and environmental degradation. Global South countries at similar stages of urbanisation face some of the same urban challenges, aside from the fact that major urban conditions worldwide are increasingly converging and pointing to shared catalysts (e.g., rural-urban migration) and globally linked processes (e.g., climate change and trade-induced growth). China’s experience can be instructive. As urbanisation transitions from a land-based approach to a more human-based one, challenges abound on both fronts.

Urbanisation in contemporary China has moved towards a Western model of urban form, characterised by significant socio-spatial segregation. Many Chinese cities have begun to exhibit the spatial grouping of residents, often leading to concentrations of affluence and deprivation, a pattern that existed before 1949. This condition manifests growing income inequality, which has risen consistently during the reform era. As the urban population becomes increasingly differentiated, spaces of exclusivity that insulate privileged groups and prohibit others will continue to define the urban landscape of China. At the same time, a new social class has arisen: the urban poor, who have come to live in cities and who are usually engaged in the lowest paying and least desirable urban employment. Rural migrants make up the bulk of the urban poor and are often among the poorest and most disenfranchised inhabitants of the contemporary Chinese city.

There is pressure on cities to find sustained sources of income to finance urban infrastructure and development. The mismatch between revenue and expenditure responsibilities at the local level is a fundamental conundrum. Correcting this requires national tax and fiscal system changes, but drastic revamping seems unlikely. The realignment of central-local fiscal relations also may help reduce local reliance on land financing, serving as a perverse incentive for land-based growth. The so-called “land-infrastructure-leverage” has provided financing for urbanisation but also resulted in the mounting local debt that lays behind urban China’s physical transformation. In addition, the increasing tension between the loss of arable land and cities’ dependence on land leasing for revenue represents a significant challenge to the already fragile human-environment relationship aggravated by rapid urbanisation.

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Wei Yang might speak softly but she talks boldly about what China could learn from Britain. We meet in a majestic hotel in her adopted home of London to compare notes on the last three decades of urban change in China, change that has been orchestrated from her birth town of Beijing.

China has become a destination for architects, town planners and social economists interested in managing a country of nearly a billion and half people, and who ask how new models can be implemented on a grand scale. With over 58 percent of the population living in urban areas (up from less than 18 percent in 1978), keeping cities moving, the air clean and their inhabitants happy is a challenge that Yang relishes.

The Megacity

Yang talks about the recent history of Chinese urbanisation. The megacities of Beijing and Shanghai were attractive 30 years ago, she explains; prices were low, work was plentiful and space was abundant. But today, these polluted cities are overpopulated, jammed with traffic and have major constraints on health care and education infrastructure.

“The government thinks these cities are now mature enough and should export economic benefit to surrounding cities,” she says. Yang is talking about the Chinese government’s current policy of promoting regional clusters such as Jingjinji, the Yangtze River Delta and the Greater Bay Area – as well as clusters around Chengdu and Xian in the future. The aim is also to take the stress off the services in the major cities. Rapidly developing strategic transportation – high-speed rail and inner-city transportation links – makes this feasible, she explains.

There are positives and negatives to such megacity clusters though. The clusters will help to regenerate and encourage social-economic development of the surrounding areas but, she argues, this is already happening naturally to a degree. “In places like Changzhou and Huzhou near Shanghai, they are already gaining benefits from the economic growth of the surrounding megacities.”

The main concern for Yang is that these areas could become overdeveloped, which would be a waste of land, money and energy. “It will help for people to have more choices but if it is over-scaled, the development will be very dispersed. Efficient land use with proper transport connections, proper jobs and a proper housing mix are what is important,” she says.

In recent years many areas in China have suffered such overdevelopment. This has led to the creation of ‘ghost cities’ – neighbourhoods, or entire districts and towns, packed with empty sky rises and devoid of residents. This is in part due to China’s development model, where local governments rely on housing estate developers to buy land from the government, which then gives the government the funds needed to provide services. But many towns have ended up standing empty as speculators and investors buy up property and keep it empty.

“In the UK, older properties are usually worth more than new ones but in China older properties are regarded as ‘second hand’ if someone has lived in them before,” she explains. Therefore, new builds will sit empty and bare and remain ‘new’ so as not to devalue them.

As there is nothing akin to council tax in China, it doesn’t cost a landlord anything to keep a property – empty or not. “At the moment in China there is a big debate as to whether local councils should introduce council tax,” says Yang. “In the UK more than 40 percent of local services are paid for with council tax – policing, healthcare, education. It is a good way to get income for the local authorities.”

Due to the fast urbanisation process in China, land sale has become one of the main income sources for local governments. This has the potential to become a problem when all the land is sold and further investment in the area is needed. Unlike in the UK, “building roads, rails, facilities, schools and services and green areas and public spaces are the responsibility of the state not the developer,” says Yang.

All land in urban areas in China is owned by the state with residential property leases given for just 70 years. Some buildings are already 20 or 30 years into their lease and there is no clear structure of what happens when the lease expires. It could be extended or renewed, or it could be given to the leaseholder but it also could be taken back by the state and resold. Whatever might happen at the end of the lease, for its duration, the state continues to incur costs as it is responsible for all services yet does not absorb any further revenue as the lease was sold upfront.

The liveable city

Today, says Yang, the new cities, megacities and city clusters are being future-proofed as best as possible. “They try to build them as well as they can. The Chinese government is very keen to use best practise but sometimes there is a mismatch,” she says. Competing departments have different priorities. The transport department might think that more roads and high-speed railways are a priority, whilst the economists would like to see more business parks and industrial estates being built.

This can lead to segmented and fragmented cities, says Yang. Therefore, the importance of town planning is essential to ensure that the public transport system is well connected so people don’t have to rely on cars. That there are not just economic programmes introduced but that cities are also liveable.

Garden Cities were taught briefly in our Chinese planning text books but only as utopian societies; however, the more I studied the more I realised that some were thriving and very successful

“We need to change the fundamental mindset,” she says. “For a lot of local authorities, they still think the priorities are economic development, when a new industrial estate doesn’t necessarily help. What is needed is a liveable city. What is actually important is this human factor and how to properly consider it.”

Yang says that the speed of growth has slowed as the authorities ensure development is more considered. “Ten or twenty years ago the rate of growth was very, very fast. The rate is now being controlled. It is now almost impossible to develop agricultural land for example.” Only 12.6 percent of China’s land is arable, and food security is a real issue in China – therefore the authorities are doing all they can to reduce desertification and urbanisation; getting permission to use valuable agricultural land is now near impossible.

Instead of using greenfield sites, China focus is shifting towards regeneration. “The government is trying to do more work to recapture smaller towns and villages and that is a major policy shift.

“People are realising that all these big cities look the same and start to lose their cultural heritage. These rural communities and towns are the foundation of our cultural ecosystem and the government is realising that losing them is a problem.”

British style planning regulations and permissions are one method China may adopt in order to avoid creating more cookie-cutter towns that are often devoid of character and local culture.

Wei Yang Garden City Model – Wolfson Economics Prize 2014

The Garden city

Another British model that Yang is excited to bring to China is a little-known Victorian socio-economic model that gave birth to some of England’s suburban home counties towns: Garden Cities.

“People think about town planning as design but the more I learnt about town planning through real projects, the more I realise design itself can’t resolve everything. You need to think about the socio-economic model,” says Yang, “how to reform land ownership and how to develop the land to ensure the value increases through the development process. It’s about how to manage the land, not just about how to design it.”

“Garden Cities were taught briefly in our Chinese planning textbooks but only as utopian societies; however, the more I studied the more I realised that some, like Welwyn Garden City and Letchworth Garden City, were thriving and very successful,” she says.

The Garden City model sees the community establishing a residents’ trust that manages the land, which is then rented for industrial, commercial and agricultural purposes to subsidise housing and improve services in the area.

“It relates to big questions about society. Who should own the land? Who should develop the land? And who should get the benefit from it? If that model is not resolved, then we have a lot of problems like we have now, such as affordability, segregated communities, disconnected transportation and jobs a significant distance from where people live.”

“Through my previous projects I realised the reasons some project couldn’t really deliver the vision we had was because these things were not being considered all together. So, I started to question the fundamental principles of town planning.”

We think it will be very beneficial to have a community trust that brings together stakeholder who can share a vision

In 2013, a British governmental push for new garden cities saw Wei Yang & Partners make the final five in the 2014 Wolfson’s Economic Prize and the company rapidly became one of most established companies in the field. Following this, in the summer of 2017, they completed a project in Jinjiang City in Fujian that adhered to the Garden City principles. It was recently commended by the Royal Town Planning Institute International Award for Planning Excellence.

Jinjiang is wealthy, thanks to its strategic location on the coast near Xiamen and opposite Taiwan, and the wealthy diaspora who return to the region to trade and invest. It is also home to historical villages – one of which was selected as a pilot town as part of the central government’s promotion of the small town gentrification model.

A campus of Fujian University was opened and the town was named ‘Jinjiang Dreamtown for Talents’ in a bid to attract university students to stay longer and start their own business in the community. Many of the historical buildings that are derelict and empty have been earmarked for renovation to be used as incubator and start-up spaces, studios or workshops. The buildings are ready to be retro-fitted and locals are opening hostels and finding other opportunities.

“We are talking about how we can build infrastructure that supports the community, such as cycleways, tourist information centres and where the best places are for restaurants, cultural facilities and car parks. It’s a programme for syncing everything together.”

Jinjiang Dream Town – Regenration Plan of Tangdong Village

“The most important thing is our inspiration from the Garden City principles,” says Yang. “We think it will be very beneficial to have a Dream Town Communities Trust that brings together stakeholders from the campus, from the village, from the city and from overseas relatives. People can share a vision and by having exclusive development rights the trust can make money through development and then use this to contribute back to the welfare system, provide essential maintenance of the village and maintain the connection with the university.”

Currently, after a 70-year lease is sold to a developer all the money arrives at once but the government have continuing, and increasing, costs as more people move on to the land. Education, healthcare and transportation – all this is the responsibility of the government. “The developers don’t have any future responsibilities for looking after these people.” China needs to consider long term management responsibility, which has become a major burden for local authorities. “You need a mechanism that allows for sustainable income every year,” Yang says.

Yang clearly has a passion for preserving traditional culture by regenerating old towns, but it is her desire for a strong land reform policy that will help change the mind set of a nation. And it may well be a Victorian town planner has a lot more influence on the urban world a century on, than he did in his own lifetime.

For more information about China’s urban environment contact Xu Jiawei in Beijing on Jiawei.Xu@cbbc.org.cn

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