Home » Opinion » Opinion Columns
Greed breeds rapid urbanization
By Wang Yong |
September 3, 2010, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IN today's opinion article ("Allure of country life draws many city dwellers"), you can see how greed breeds urban sprawl at the expense of rural interests and how ugly urbanization has become.
In the past 30 years, China has borrowed urbanization from the West in a misguided belief that the bucolic countryside - a cornerstone of Chinese civilization for thousands of years - is synonymous with backwardness.
For 30 years, China has spared no effort in driving farmers into cities for temporary menial jobs such as janitors and construction workers. By 2008, about 140 million farmers had abandoned their farmland to drift in and between cities like rootless grass.
Some policy makers and academics have justified the uprooting of farmers by cloaking their arguments in an academic veneer - saying that urbanization creates more GDP than agriculture and that China lags behind many other countries in the pace and rate of urbanization.
These policy makers and academics do not care, or rather choose to ignore, the glaringly obvious fact that half of China's cities are suffering acid rains - just one example of how exploding urban life has ruined the country's natural environment.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released a report in July on China's urban development, warning that partly due to rapid urbanization, China had consumed more than twice as much natural resources as its own ecological system could provide.
Now that rapid urbanization has proven a failure in making a better life, why are many Chinese cities still racing to the bottom by kicking farmers out of their land? One answer is greed.
"As far as land grabs go, it was quiet and secret - and the perpetrators almost got away with it," Xinhua says in today's lead opinion article.
The story is simple:
A city grabs farmers' land for no good reason but with a fishy compensation policy - any farmer evicted from his land gets a big house. So about 200 city officials of this city pretend to be farmers in an attempt to be given a big house each.
Please note: It was not just one or two bad apples, it was 200 officials - a collective device to milk the dubious urbanization project.
A collective crime indeed.
Next time you discuss urbanization in China, please remember that it's not just an economic or academic joke.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
