China’s Great Uprooting - Moving 250 Million Into Cities | Hacker News Reader

China’s Great Uprooting - Moving 250 Million Into Cities

nytimes.com

41 pointsteawithcarl27 comments

(Fuck the GFW, we need vpn to open the nytimes.com)I'm a game developer working in Nanjing. The biggest problem which my generation facing is the housing price. Having a house in city means your childen can take the much much better education in city; means your family can take city-level health-care ... House is not only a house in china, because of the "residence registration system". Only elderly and not competitive people also living in the country which i was born, there're much clear air and safety food but good job , good education. Job and education means future, So many young people working hard in city ,we share one dream. PRC was really hurt during 1966 ~ 1976, we are still on the way of recovery

I always find New York times articles present a pessimistic if not outright incorrect articles on China. They are pushing some agenda of their own.

So is urbanisation a bad idea? (if so, why have ALL developed countries done this?)

Or is really fast urbanization bad?

I've been in and out of China (mostly in) since late 2001. There are great things about the nation and it's simply incredible to behold. Unfortunately, when you travel through 20 kilometres of empty skyscrapers, with many still under construction, you realize there's some serious problems with both government policy and the international media's mass urbanization notion. Chiefly, development is removing arable land, there's nothing for people who come to the city to do, and nobody can afford the new apartments anyway (mostly they are the second, third, tenth or twentieth speculative real estate acquisition of some corrupt official or real estate developer!). As someone who has watched things change over more than a decade, it is very clear to me that the whole economic miracle inside the country has been propped up by state-level creative accounting and is about to enter meltdown. There's no two ways about it, China's bubble is about to burst. At this point, anything short of broad scale civil unrest will be a good outcome. Best of luck to the Chinese people.

>There's no two ways about it, China's bubble is about to burst.

Honestly, I have been reading about this for the last 5-6 years. Trust me, I have read about the empty cities, malls, streets and office building. I have read about construction for the sake of construction, poor quality of construction. The civil unrest that is about to happen for the last 10 years.

While I am no economics guru, but my limited observation and understanding tells me that nothing is about to go nuclear in China. China is sitting on a huge pile of cash and its diversifying and expanding its business interest all over the place. Not only poor and third world countries, chinese companies are also investing on developed nations and buying up or merging with local companies (though they are facing some restriction on that). Companies are no longer moving their factories to China because of cheap production cost, they are moving their also because of rising local demand.

I think China has a lot of problem (just like any other country), but I feel that it often over inflated.

Personally I am in support of a powerful China (economically and militarily) to counteract the current monopoly. Ideally I would prefer 3-4 equally powerful nation competing for dominance, but I will take 2 for now.

Human rights and living condition will only improve with time. The present China is much better in these regards (but not enough) than how things were 10 years ago. I think things will get even better 10 years from now. Big changes takes time and China have come a long way in a very short period of time (relatively speaking).

Seeing is different to reading. Though I agree with you, there are too many factors I see to ignore. For example, I can't see jobs for university graduates (even professors!), urbanization has basically resulted in construction work as a means of mass employment (hint: makes problem worse), and the cost of basic sustenance inside of China (food, drink, etc.) is higher in real terms than in neighbouring countries and growing rapidly year-on-year. At the same time, real estate which was the engine of the economy is in meltdown (source: first hand discussions with developers, observation). The cost of an apartment in a third-tier Chinese city is far higher than that of neighbours. Realising this economic climate and how much further their government-backed cash goes overseas, we witness the acceleration of private wealth leaving China. The last time I flew through Beijing airport, UBS had proudly procured all the billboards. It's not rocket science, there's a virtual robbery going on... similar to other periods of economic or political change worldwide... similar actors, and few in the country would deny it. People are upset. It's not pretty.

I admit, my economics knowledge is limited. But if the repeated bubble/burst economy of US has taught us anything, having economics knowledge in the grand scale amounts for jack shit. Its really hard to predict, precisely whats going to happen with the economy when your country is as big as USA/China. You can only have good guestimate. Having said that, my problem is with this kind of sentences:

>China's bubble is about to burst.

What does "about to" means, when you have been reading about it for the last10 years? Is it tomorrow, next year, 10 years from now?

One things I understand about economy of developing country (and yes China is one despite being second largest economy) is that, there is always some scope for growth. Unlike matured economy like USA/European countries where almost every aspect of the country's economy is tied to each other. If something goes belly up, it usually affects other parts of the economy. This is not usually true for developing countries like China. They don't depend on a single source of market to survive, there is always some scope for growth and something else to pick you up from the slump.

Developed nations are like almost full glass of water, you have to be careful how fast you try to feel it up. Developing countries are like quarter/half-filled glass, if you try to fill it up too quick you might slosh a bit of water out of the glass, making it messy, but you can afford to fill it up quickly.

Without taking a stance on what will happen in this particular case -- bubbles burst very slow at first and awfully fast when people panic.

This is China's attempt to end the artificial labor shortage problems they've been having in urban areas. It'll be trivial for China to increase the productivity of their farming massively, given how intentionally backwards it currently is.

Intentionally?

What parent means probably is that, given a surplus of rural labor, farming has been intentionally kept backward so that all these nongmin have something to do. As labor moves from the country side to the cities, the requirement of giving people work to do just because disappears, and technology can be brought in so that agriculture more resembles that of a developed country.

They really need to do something about hukou first. I can't read the article yet because I'm behind the wall without a working VPN, perhaps they mention that.

I think I'd prefer for my food to come from that "backward" farming than the developed nation's industrial agriculture.

You know very little about agriculture in China I would guess. Short answer: no you don't. Long answer: we've had chicken, milk, pork, rice scares all in the last few months.

Okay maybe not that backward farming.

Citation? (preferably showing how widespread they are as well).

(While I agree with your point, alarm bells go off when I read lists of 'events' with no references)

I agree that references are nice. But then if someone is pushing an agenda it's easy for them to cherry pick the URLs they provide. So even if someone does provide references it's probably a good idea to use a search engine to check.

Milk 2008: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7614083.stm)

Milk 2010: (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126255525849313997.html)

Milk 2013: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22088977)

Glow in dark pork: (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8544851...)

Waste oil from gutters outside restaurants repackaged and sold for consumption: (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7971983...)

None of those are "from the last few months". And all of them are (pro) western media (less reliable).

In addition, it's seems non of them relate to China's intentional avoidance of modern technology in farming...

Here's an article about contaminated rice: http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/cadmium-rice-...

Well, I'm living through it. We recently got chicken back in our work cafeteria after a couple of months without. Colleagues are still smuggling in milk powder from Hong Kong and other places abroad for their newborns, I think it's more illicit and expensive than cocaine now, but that might just be hyperbole. Rice is quite recent and the government is conducting nationwide soil tests.

Pork is always problematic since those babies are basically general waste recycling machines, it's hard to figure out what the nongmin are feeding them. Not sure of anything specific though, eventually all these scares start blurring together and I just stop caring too much.

Because agriculture is such a thankless job here, and gov regulation is weak, there is a lot of incentive for nongmin to cheat without much disincentive. And to be honest, the "industrialization farmed" or GMO food that many westerners are worried about....well, those are first world problems that we'd love to worry about instead.

Indeed, having so little economic productivity as to have a peasant class would give one someone to feel superior to, as an educated person. Their hovels are also wonderfully picturesque if one doesn't see that the building one thought derelict is actually inhabited by three families.

Yes, intentionally. China has, through various land and farming control laws, retarded their farming productivity to an extreme level.

While their manufacturing / industrial productivity and know-how has skyrocketed over 30 years, their farming productivity has kept pace. That's deliberate to give hundreds of millions of people something to do (as another comment noted). Their manufacturing sector could not absorb another 250 million people overnight (or over the prior 20 years).

South Korean farms are up to ten times more productive. If China's farming was as productive as South Korea, they'd only need 30 to 50 million farmers. Currently China has 37% of its employment base working in agriculture, or upwards of 300 million people. The US by comparison has a substantial surplus of food with just 4 to 5 million total people working in agriculture (including illegal immigrants).

This is a good opportunity to invest into farm equipment companies that will benefit from the coming boom in farming productivity in China. As they shift labor into their urban industrial base, they'll begin to change laws to boost farming productivity finally (most likely you'll see a big rise in large corporate farms in China).

"The shift is occurring so quickly, and the potential costs are so high, that some fear rural China is once again the site of radical social engineering."

Yesterday Detroit announced it would be defaulting on billions of debt - just the latest chapter of what is happening in that city, in that state, in the entire old Steel Belt. In the 1960s, Detriot was the center of US innovation and the economic engine of the country - we all know what it is nowadays.

Why is this not "radical social engineering?" The US unemployment rate is currently at a level that has not been seen since five months in 1992, and before that not since 1984. Why is that not radical social engineering? The amount of hypocrisy and double standards in the US media is mindblowing...

In the USA the last 60-80 years we've had a radical social engineering project to force people to live in suburban areas. Home interest mortgage deduction, demolition of urban neighborhoods for freeways, the funneling of tax dollars away from cities and towards new suburban/exurban development, the wholesale dismantling of public trolley and transit systems..

Detroit is just one example of many.

It isn't even just active money used against suburbia, but the subsidization of urban sprawl by giving everyone "free" roads. In practical economics, it tremendously subsidized the capacity for people to live in suburbia to not have to build and maintain the roads that lead to their doorsteps, and instead let that burden fall to the common man. They weren't making the economic choice to live compact and not pay for connection to the outside world, because the public purse did it for them.

I know nothing of this but I figured that when you build up a new subdivision as a developer you are responsible for the road construction leading to and within the new site. Is that not the case? You just build 200 homes and the government has to pay for all of the infrastructure? Connecting municipal utilities I thought would also be part of the developer's cost - which gets passed on to the home purchasers. So there would not be a "free" road for everyone.

Developers have to pay development fees to cities, who then provide the services. Roads are probably a bit more complex because they are capital intensive, but zoning rules are supposed to keep development in check in this case. A town/city can decide to "expand", perhaps with developer prodding, and in some cases the other way around.

Detroit was utterly killed by its suburbs combined with white flight accelerated by the race riots of the late 60s.

What is happening in Detroit seems to me more like "dealing with a mess" than radical social engineering.

Because the US didn't force Detroit to default on billions of debt? The rural Chinese are being specifically targeted for these reforms, nobody has been targeting Detroit's debt over the past 50 years.

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