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Beijing's greener bet
By Cheng Yunjie and Huang Hai |
August 18, 2011, Thursday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
PEOPLE from all over the world have considered Beijing as an important window for observing China's politics and cultural development.
While this statement is true, it is also true that the capital's economic growth is lagging behind that of other Chinese cities.
By posting an 8 percent rise in its GDP from January to June, down four percentage points from the same period of last year, Beijing's economic expansion has been ranked slowest across the country for the first time ever, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The country's GDP surged 9.6 percent during the same period, down 1.5 percentage points from a year earlier.
Beijing's decreased ranking came after the city took the lead in clamping down on automobiles and housing, the two engines propelling China's consumption and investment, amid public grumbles over gridlock and soaring housing costs.
Spokesman Zhao Lei from the Beijing National Development and Reform Commission said the city's decelerating economic trajectory remains on the track projected by the municipal government and has met the government's expectations. Zhao said that the "higher the GDP growth is, the more credit the government shall receive" type of thinking that prevailed for the past couple of decades is no longer appropriate.
In response to the central government's call to improve the quality of economic expansion, the city government adopted a car plate lottery system in January that allowed only 17,600 new plates to be issued per month. The city government later promised to secure a decline in housing prices.
"As a booming automobile and real estate market has broad driving effects for a raft of relevant industries, our macro-economic adjustment has real punch and touches the core dilemma of the development of Chinese cities," Zhao said.
The city's commercial housing sales volume declined nearly 30 percent in the first half over the same period last year, while automobile sales plummeted by 50 percent.
Before the limitations were put in place, more than 60 percent of the city's consumption was generated by automobile sales, while real estate sales contributed to half of the city's investment and 20 percent of municipal government revenues. In a recent chart ranking the GDP quality of the country's 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the city of Beijing was listed at the top.
Niu Wenyuan, head of the CAS Strategic Development Research Team responsible for compiling the chart, said a new GDP quality index has been created to evaluate the performance of regional governments.
The index is a compound of 15 indicators involving energy and water consumption, proportion of fiscal revenues to GDP, urbanization, registered jobless rates, urban-rural discrepancies, disposal rate of domestic waste, per capita annual income, life expectancy, living standards in rural areas, the proportion of civil servants to the total population, public facilities and capacity-building for sustained development.
Official statistics show the city's annual per capita GDP has exceeded US$10,000, one of the thresholds for a moderately developed economy, while its Engel's Coefficient (food consumption ratio) has dropped to almost 30 percent, much lower than the 40 percent benchmark designated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for a "rich neighborhood."
"We have come to a turning point. It's reasonable to expect the city's growth trajectory to move southward," said Yu Xiuqin, spokeswoman of the Beijing Statistical Bureau. "The question is, what do we expect Beijing to become? A sprawling energy and resource-guzzler, or a greener and more comfortable place to live? If a mega-city like Beijing can break its bottlenecks to achieve sustained development, the future of China's modernization and urbanization will be much less bumpy."
The authors are Xinhua writers.
While this statement is true, it is also true that the capital's economic growth is lagging behind that of other Chinese cities.
By posting an 8 percent rise in its GDP from January to June, down four percentage points from the same period of last year, Beijing's economic expansion has been ranked slowest across the country for the first time ever, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The country's GDP surged 9.6 percent during the same period, down 1.5 percentage points from a year earlier.
Beijing's decreased ranking came after the city took the lead in clamping down on automobiles and housing, the two engines propelling China's consumption and investment, amid public grumbles over gridlock and soaring housing costs.
Spokesman Zhao Lei from the Beijing National Development and Reform Commission said the city's decelerating economic trajectory remains on the track projected by the municipal government and has met the government's expectations. Zhao said that the "higher the GDP growth is, the more credit the government shall receive" type of thinking that prevailed for the past couple of decades is no longer appropriate.
In response to the central government's call to improve the quality of economic expansion, the city government adopted a car plate lottery system in January that allowed only 17,600 new plates to be issued per month. The city government later promised to secure a decline in housing prices.
"As a booming automobile and real estate market has broad driving effects for a raft of relevant industries, our macro-economic adjustment has real punch and touches the core dilemma of the development of Chinese cities," Zhao said.
The city's commercial housing sales volume declined nearly 30 percent in the first half over the same period last year, while automobile sales plummeted by 50 percent.
Before the limitations were put in place, more than 60 percent of the city's consumption was generated by automobile sales, while real estate sales contributed to half of the city's investment and 20 percent of municipal government revenues. In a recent chart ranking the GDP quality of the country's 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the city of Beijing was listed at the top.
Niu Wenyuan, head of the CAS Strategic Development Research Team responsible for compiling the chart, said a new GDP quality index has been created to evaluate the performance of regional governments.
The index is a compound of 15 indicators involving energy and water consumption, proportion of fiscal revenues to GDP, urbanization, registered jobless rates, urban-rural discrepancies, disposal rate of domestic waste, per capita annual income, life expectancy, living standards in rural areas, the proportion of civil servants to the total population, public facilities and capacity-building for sustained development.
Official statistics show the city's annual per capita GDP has exceeded US$10,000, one of the thresholds for a moderately developed economy, while its Engel's Coefficient (food consumption ratio) has dropped to almost 30 percent, much lower than the 40 percent benchmark designated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for a "rich neighborhood."
"We have come to a turning point. It's reasonable to expect the city's growth trajectory to move southward," said Yu Xiuqin, spokeswoman of the Beijing Statistical Bureau. "The question is, what do we expect Beijing to become? A sprawling energy and resource-guzzler, or a greener and more comfortable place to live? If a mega-city like Beijing can break its bottlenecks to achieve sustained development, the future of China's modernization and urbanization will be much less bumpy."
The authors are Xinhua writers.
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