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Urbanisation

Moving on up
The government unveils a new people-centred plan for urbanisation

Mar 22nd 2014 | BEIJING | From the print edition

AFTER months of bickering
among officials, on March
16th the government revealed
a long-awaited plan for
managing what has been the
worlds largest migration of
rural residents into cities. The

Build it and they might come

document admitted that much

was going wrong: the spread of urban disease with worsening congestion and pollution and a rising risk
of social tension. It called for a new style of urbanisation, focused on making cities fairer for migrants.
This will require considerable government spending, and will meet tough resistance.
It is remarkable that a government so fond of planning has taken this long to produce a plan for
urbanisation; in the past 35 years the population of urban China has grown by more than 500m people,
far outstripping the pace of city expansion that was seen in the developed world during the early industrial
era. Individual cities love to plan. Big ones, such as Shanghai, are fond of grandiose exhibitions showing
off their dreams (see picture). But uncertainty over how to handle the influx of migrants has complicated
efforts to produce a plan on a national scale. Chinese leaders wanted bigger cities, but worried about the
cost of giving migrants full access to urban welfare and public services.
The new document reflects a shift in city-building strategy that has become evident since new leaders took
over in China in 2012; it recognises that urban China risks being destabilised by the creation of a huge
mass of what the Chinese media sometimes admit are second-class citizens. The plan calls for the
gradual elimination of the chief cause of this: the hukou system of household registration that was
introduced in the 1950s to prevent internal immigration and which, though much relaxed since then,
remains a hidden barrier. Even migrants who have lived in cities for many years, or the urban-born
children of such migrants, are given far less access to government-funded health care and education than
other city dwellers. This is because their rural hukou is often impossible to change.
By 2020, according to the plan, 100m migrants are to obtain urban hukou. This is a cautious target. The
government admits it would still leave 200m peopleby then roughly two-thirds of migrantswithout
city-resident status. Some state-run newspapers say it would mean, on average, that 17m migrants a year
would get urban hukou. That would be a step up, but in recent years the numbers have already been rising
fast, albeit from a low base. The government said last year that between 2010 and 2012 an average of 8.4m
a year had been granted urban status.
Crucially, the plan does not suggest when the hukou system might be scrapped altogether. And it still

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Urbanisation: Moving on up | The Economist

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allows bigger
cities, which
migrants prefer,
to continue
using hukou
barriers as a
way of trying to
limit population
growth. In the
16 cities with
more than 5m
people, officials
will be allowed
to give hukou
only to migrants
who gain a
certain number
of points (in
cities that have
experimented
with this, points
are awarded on
the basis of
educational
qualifications,
property ownership and other factors that rule out most migrants). Even in the smallest cities only
migrants with legal and stable work and accommodationwhich many do not havewill be able to get
urban hukou.
Local governments are likely to interpret this as strictly as they can. They are fearful of having to spend a
lot more on public services such as health care, education and subsidised housing, which barely reach
most non-urban hukou holders. The new plan gives few details of how beefing up these services will be
paid for, an omission that suggests much bickering remains to be done. It sets a modest target for
urbanisation of 60% in 2020, up from nearly 54% today. This would imply a slowing down of the growth
rate; that is not a bad signal to send given how local governments have been using high urbanisation
targets as a pretext to continue grabbing land from farmers and engaging in an orgy of often wasteful
construction.
The plan also gives a nod to the aspirations of Chinas new middle-class, some of whom are pressing for a
greater say in how their cities are run. The level of democratisation, it says, should be increased in the
drawing up of city plans. Officials, however, chose to keep the plan secret until after the closing of the
annual session of the National Peoples Congress, the countrys legislature. It would have been a pity to
spoil it with debate, even by a rubber-stamp parliament from which migrants are all but excluded.

From the print edition: China

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