Shanghai sets population at 25M

Yes, Beijing used to be cruel to migrant workers. Other cities in China used to be cruel, too. Being caught without a permit could lead to detention and forced labour until repatriated in early 2000s.

It is not even the fault of the Beijing local residents be to blame for the tragedy today. The cream of economy development was either intentionally or unintentionally hoarded in the metropolises while the second tiers cities never get the chance. People have to migrate and follow the money.

I think the choice isn't between bad urban conditions and good conditions somewhere else. The choice is between bad urban conditions and bad rural conditions. Bad urban conditions provide people with better economic opportunity than bad rural conditions. Urban conditions provide more social mobility and this also tends to improve the economic prospects of the poor.

As demanding and dangerous as poorly regulated manufacturing workplaces can be, they tend to be no more demanding and no more dangerous than agricultural work.

I felt the same way when I first toured the shanty towns in the UAE where essentially “Slave” labor (mostly Pakistani / Indian / Bangladesh indentured servants) lived. In hack days I organized there in the early to mid 2010s, the students built a lot of wearable tech to help monitor the living and working conditions of these workers. Was very eye opening for all to say the least.

The problem is that these immigrants will never be able to become a first-tier city citizen, due to hukou. The government is trying to move these people into empty buildings in second tiered cities, but there are no jobs there. (thus alot of these migrants actually moved back to the farms last I heard)

1.) Statistica says that in 2016, China rural households only made about $1000/year. and urban households only made about $3000/year. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/259451/annual-per-capita...)

You mention illegal immigration, this is why illegal immigration is bad. It's essentially a flood of people that cannot be supported by the system. Floods are never good, the goal in population transfer should almost always be gradual movements.

An obvious solution is rural development, looking to India as an example. The accelerating urban migration in India in the 90s/2000s was not organic: young people were forced to leave their homes because they didn't have job opportunities or enough land to farm, and then older people had to follow for cultural and economic reasons. The ultimate goal is sustainable urban growth, but cities can't immediately handle what this would require. Instead, India has instituted fairly successful rural development programs that are aimed at increasing jobs, improving social safety nets, and empowering women. I think China should seriously consider ramping up similar efforts.

http://blogs.worldbank.org/endpovertyinsouthasia/what-india-...

As one grew up in Beijing and lived for 26 years, I can definitely say that comparing Hutong to Indian slum is really really ignorant. You can ask anyone in Beijing, they will tell you that many people live in Hutong is one group of the richest people in Beijing. Nearly all people live in Hutong are Beijing natives, and their houses inside the hutong are called "siheyuan" which are among the most expensive real estate in beijing. Most "siheyuan", houses inside the hutong, are build decades ago and owned by local natives for long time, and its value increases much fast than other real estates as nearly all located in the center of beijing. I just check on an agency site, the cheapest house are more than 5 million us dollar, and many are more than 10 million us dollar. only the most successful people in Beijing will buy those houses. (if you know Chinese, you can check on this site or by google translate: http://esf.fang.com/house/i34-kw%cb%c4%ba%cf%d4%ba/)

if you have ever been to, you can have a visit and talk to people in hutong, you will know how wealthy and happy like they are.

and there are also many other statements in you text are totally wrong and with groundless prejudice. No employer will threat to report to police because of work’s identity, you may again ridiculously think beijing as America. Beijing is china’s capital, more than third people there are not locals, they also don’t need any documents to go to and stay in their capital. And nowadays, most rich people in beijing are not locals, they come from all over the china.

>In order to raise the living standards of an entire area, you have to enforce issues like safe labor practice, minimum wage, vacation days, etc. Without heavy hand regulation in a developing countries, these things don't magically come at the kindness of employers. They must be forced.

And so I suppose there an no people working below minimum wage in a developed country like the US? Or maybe your solution of more regulation only works some of the time, and only in some cases, and is not a "must have" as you put it.

>but I'm glad Shanghai at least understands this is a problem instead of copying other Asian cities that have failed at this

How is what China is doing beneficial in any way?

"Ewww! Poor people! Slums! Ugh! They come here and mess up our urban real estate. Such an eye sore! Can we just get rid of them?"

Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn’t, James Scott had to write it a century later. The wait was worth it.

Scott starts with the story of “scientific forestry” in 18th century Prussia. Enlightenment rationalists noticed that peasants were just cutting down whatever trees happened to grow in the forests, like a chump. They came up with a better idea: clear all the forests and replace them by planting identical copies of Norway spruce (the highest-lumber-yield-per-unit-time tree) in an evenly-spaced rectangular grid. Then you could just walk in with an axe one day and chop down like a zillion trees an hour and have more timber than you could possibly ever want.

This went poorly. The impoverished ecosystem couldn’t support the game animals and medicinal herbs that sustained the surrounding peasant villages, and they suffered an economic collapse. The endless rows of identical trees were a perfect breeding ground for plant diseases and forest fires. And the complex ecological processes that sustained the soil stopped working, so after a generation the Norway spruces grew stunted and malnourished. Yet for some reason, everyone involved got promoted, and “scientific forestry” spread across Europe and the world.

And this pattern repeats with suspicious regularity across history, not just in biological systems but also in social ones.

Natural organically-evolved cities tend to be densely-packed mixtures of dark alleys, tiny shops, and overcrowded streets. Modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea: an evenly-spaced rectangular grid of identical giant Brutalist apartment buildings separated by wide boulevards, with everything separated into carefully-zoned districts. Yet for some reason, whenever these new rational cities were built, people hated them and did everything they could to move out into more organic suburbs. And again, for some reason the urban planners got promoted, became famous, and spread their destructive techniques around the world.

Ye olde organically-evolved peasant villages tended to be complicated confusions of everybody trying to raise fifty different crops at the same time on awkwardly shaped cramped parcels of land. Modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea: giant collective mechanized farms growing purpose-bred high-yield crops and arranged in (say it with me) evenly-spaced rectangular grids. Yet for some reason, these giant collective farms had lower yields per acre than the old traditional methods, and wherever they arose famine and mass starvation followed. And again, for some reason governments continued to push the more “modern” methods, whether it was socialist collectives in the USSR, big agricultural corporations in the US, or sprawling banana plantations in the Third World.

Traditional lifestyles of many East African natives were nomadic, involving slash-and-burn agriculture in complicated jungle terrain according to a bewildering variety of ad-hoc rules. Modern scientific rationalists in African governments (both colonial and independent) came up with a better idea – resettlement of the natives into villages, where they could have modern amenities like schools, wells, electricity, and evenly-spaced rectangular grids. Yet for some reason, these villages kept failing: their crops died, their economies collapsed, and their native inhabitants disappeared back into the jungle. And again, for some reason the African governments kept trying to bring the natives back and make them stay, even if they had to blur the lines between villages and concentration camps to make it work.

Why did all of these schemes fail? And more importantly, why were they celebrated, rewarded, and continued, even when the fact of their failure became too obvious to ignore? Scott gives a two part answer.

The first part of the story is High Modernism, an aesthetic taste masquerading as a scientific philosophy. The High Modernists claimed to be about figuring out the most efficient and high-tech way of doing things, but most of them knew little relevant math or science and were basically just LARPing being rational by placing things in evenly-spaced rectangular grids.

But the High Modernists were pawns in service of a deeper motive: the centralized state wanted the world to be “legible”, ie arranged in a way that made it easy to monitor and control. An intact forest might be more productive than an evenly-spaced rectangular grid of Norway spruce, but it was harder to legislate rules for, or assess taxes on.

The state promoted the High Modernists’ platitudes about The Greater Good as cover, in order to implement the totalitarian schemes they wanted to implement anyway. The resulting experiments were usually failures by the humanitarian goals of the Modernists, but resounding successes by the command-and-control goals of the state. And so we gradually transitioned from systems that were messy but full of fine-tuned hidden order, to ones that were barely-functional but really easy to tax.

more at http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like...

Source: that's where I got sick and almost died lol.

Stuff changes rapidly though, so if I go back to where I was before there's probably a subway line and brand new development. Slums get pushed out to another spot.

They would "magically" appear if first world countries like the US added incremental import tariffs based on labor law adherence.

Source? The original article doesn't seem to suggest this.

i guess just because smething it's cramped and small you would say also to residents of Tokyo and Hongkong they are living in slums

the poorest people in Beijing definitely don't live in hutongs, which is nowadays quite hipster area to live, because it's extremely central, the poorest people live in basemenets/nuclear shelters where they have one room basically without outside wall (once or twice I went to basement of my 25fl modern building as well to find out we have there these "rat" people) or they live far far away in suburbs basically in villages which may look like slums

but calling hutongs slum like buildings shows extreme ignorance, I guess you would then call half of Europan historical capitals with narrow streets also slum like

and you can't really compare India and China, it's two different worlds, I was in richest areas of Mumbai and could still easily children sleeping on sidewalk just on cardboard, can't see such thing almost in any Chinese city, China is economically and pretty much in any field miles ahead India which is decades behind

Americans are especially prone to this as the current generations are so far removed from the realities of the world. Economically it is impossible for everyone in the world to live like middle-class America but because of their compassion (guilt) when facing actual market conditions, react by trying to hide ignore or outlaw slum economies.

This is the road to hell being paved with good intentions. I am also prone to this as despite being incredibly welathy relative to the world as a bay area software engineer I still feel like something is "missing" and am striving for something. This desire, which drives my life, is disrupted when I see things like slums. The self-interested striving can only be justified is I am a striver than someone who has a certain responsibility to the world.

Smart people considering others "dumb" instead of the self smart also dodges this responsibility so that the individual can self-indulgent ly pursue interests rather than teach and not be appreciated.

I suspect culturally and biologically we renomalize so quickly so that there is always something better for tomorrow so that we have a reason to live for today.

One policy I have found very interesting is to require developers to "invest" in the neighbourhood in exchange for building permits.

For example, the government could require developers to pay for public infrastructure before they can build (eg. they need to pay a part of a new subway line, or they need to renew the sewer system etc.)

This helps address the problem that there is lots of capital available for building new stuff, but nobody wants to pay for maintenance.

A good start could be just to make remote all the jobs that can be made remote, but of course this would not cover a big part of jobs which need a whole team in the same location and specialized machinery (Eg the whole manufacturing sector)

Or, long term, lease all properties at market rate.

2) Zone most blocks for (high quality, safe) towers and make others into parks.

Campaign to Drive Out Migrants Slams Beijing’s Best and Brightest(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/world/asia/china-beijing-...)

Why Parts of Beijing Look Like a Devastated War Zone(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/china-beijing-...)

Manufacturing stopped net expanding years ago, many of their largest state-corporate manufacturing enterprises are simultaneously loaded to the ceiling with debt and being heavily subsidized to maintain current levels of employment and output.

There is wide discussion about local governments being allowed to go bankrupt, because the debt burdens have gotten so extreme:

"China Central Bank Official Says Bankruptcy May Benefit the Country"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-25/pboc-offi...

China's goal, in theory, is to transition increasingly to a services economy, to provide the next leg of its growth, as manufacturing can't provide that. Service economies grow far slower than the type of manufacturing fill-in-the-slack / join the WTO boom they saw from ~1992-2015. They can no longer afford to keep accumulating debt as they have been since 2007. S&P is forecasting another ~75% increase in their total debt position in just the next five or so years, which would push them to... ~550%-600% debt to GDP ratio (possibly worse when counting all the shadow debt), or nearly twice that of the US. It's untenable to say the least.

Bottom line: China has to start applying the brakes, and that likely means dramatically slowing the migration into the cities. That migration is unsustainable if China has to slow its debt expansion (which it does).

It takes extraordinary perpetual economic expansion to provide enough jobs for all of those people and pay for the infrastructure demands. China's financial reserves haven't kept pace with either their debt or GDP growth, with about 3/4 of those reserves untouchable. Their ability to continue to finance the wild debts that have gone with the local government & infrastructure splurges, is heavily restricted now (if cities like Shanghai or Beijing want to add millions of more people, it'd require continuing to fund all of that while the overall context gets more shaky).

    > they wanted to move everyone to the major cities

What they want is urbanization of the less developed areas, many of which were farmlands from before.

To a lesser extend, Beijing + Shanghai has this problem as well. I was in BJ 7 years ago (so my experience may be outdated), but there are parts of the old city that still has Hutongs, which are slum like buildings that have largely been vacated but migrant workers have "illegally" occupied. (I put "illegal" in quotes because human beings aspiring for shelter shouldn't be illegal, anyways, off point)

The root of the problem is migrant workers moving into cities for slave-like labor and are commonly exploited by local residents and employers. They're offered "jobs" that are way below the legal minimum wage and are often paid under the table. They can't say no because their employers have power over them (threat to report to police, etc). In many sense, "illegal" migrant workers are not that different from "illegal" immigrants.

In order to raise the living standards of an entire area, you have to enforce issues like safe labor practice, minimum wage, vacation days, etc. Without heavy hand regulation in a developing countries, these things don't magically come at the kindness of employers. They must be forced. The developed countries all went through this stage much earlier this century (think back on all the activists who died pushing for labor rights in U.S. in early 1900s). When you have a massive population of people who are in dire situations and who don't have anywhere to turn, it's difficult to force employers to raise working standards.

It's a difficult issue. On one hand, it's pretty heavy handed and inhuman to tell a migrant worker they're not allowed to live in a city that's part of their own damn country. On the other hand, we don't want cities to race to the bottom with unsanitary and slum like conditions. What's the balance? I've no idea, but I'm glad Shanghai at least understands this is a problem instead of copying other Asian cities that have failed at this

In the UK, in the 1800's, millions moved to London, and lived in shocking slum conditions. Life expectancy was ~30 years, diseases like cholera killed many, because of overcrowding and poor sanitation. Pollution was awful, As recently as 1952, 10,000 people died in four days in the great smog of London https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London.

In summary, it took a long time to address the problem.

People will say "but they need to tackle pollution, and congestion," and I'm in the Pigouvian camp that it is more fair and economically efficient to tax externalities themselves (the disease) rather than making heavy-handed and arbitrary rules.

Anyways, in China this is not the worst thing their government is doing.