Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

In the future, the government wants to concentrate the population in belts of supercities, including one thick urban string that will thread its way up the Yangtze from Shanghai to Chongqing through Nanjing, Hefei, and Wuhan. 18To tie these conglomerations together, a high-speed railway is due for completion by 2012. That is just the start. Urban development looks likely to become more intense nationwide. The consulting firm McKinsey advocates the creation of dense urban belts between Beijing and Tianjin, Shanghai and Suzhou, and Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The Dutch architect Neville Mars envisages a day when city clusters will fuse together to create a superintense megaconglomeration stretching from Beijing to Shanghai and along the Yangtze. 19

Chongqing was trying to set an example of how a city could grow big and stay clean. Its mayor, Bo Xilai, had earned plaudits for greening Dalian with lawns earlier in his career. Now he was trying to go one step further by creating a “forest city.” Such was the rush to plant urban trees that other regions complained Chongqing had left no saplings for them. The government also set aside an “ecological shield” region in the northwest of the municipality, from which people were encouraged to migrate to the inner city and alleviate population pressure on the Yangtze.

But the cleanup remained a low priority compared with economic growth. As people move off the land and into the sky, they produce less and consume more. In theory, they become socialized and civilized. In practice, they spend more time shopping and eating junk food.

A nearby shopping center could belong to any city on earth: pedestriani-zed streets, boutiques, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and a giant screen blaring out pop-jingle ads. As people buy, eat, and drink in ever greater quantities, they produce more waste. Dealing with that rubbish is becoming an ever more pressing problem.

I took a taxi into the hills to see the biggest of the megacity’s megarubbish pits: the Changshengqiao landfill. It was an awesome sight; a reservoir of garbage more than 30 meters deep and stretching over an area of 350,000 square meters, the size of about seventy football playing fields.

The waste engineer Wang Yukun told me the city produced 3,500 tons of junk every day. None of it was recycled. Some was burned. Here, it was layered like lasagna: six meters of rubbish, half a meter of soil, a chemical treatment, and then a huge black sheet of high-density polyethylene lining. Three years after opening, the site contained more than a million tons of rubbish.

Once it was full, the city planned to build a golf course on top. The day when people would be driving and putting on top of a mountain of garbage looked set to come sooner than expected. “The site was designed to serve the city for twenty years, but it has filled faster than we expected. I guess it will be completely full in fifteen,” Wang predicted.

The same was true for sewage and industrial wastewater, which was contaminating the giant reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam, a few hundred kilometers downstream, sooner than expected. As fast as the authorities were building wastewater plants, the pollution in the Yangtze was outstripping their capacity. The impact on agriculture and public health was estimated to cost Chongqing about 4.3 percent of its annual GDP. 20

The story was common throughout China. Move farmers into the city and their consumption of resources increased threefold and their emissions surged along with their junk. 21By 2020, when the government aims to create a xiaokang shei (moderately prosperous society), the volume of urban garbage in China is expected to reach 400 million tons, equivalent to the figure for the entire world in 1997. 22With cities already struggling to cope, that problem looked set to be a new source of social tension and environmental degradation.

Cleaning the streets of crime was another urban challenge. In many Chinese cities, the public security bureau was more likely to detain journalists than to take them for a drive. But in Chongqing, the city went so far as to dispatch an English-speaking officer, Lai Hansong, as a guide. I was suspicious that he was just another propaganda official, but Lai insisted he was a regular beat cop who had been patrolling the Yuzhang district for six years. “It is a low-crime area,” he said. “We mostly deal with thefts or fights.” In an average week, he claimed, he dealt with fewer than five incidents.

It was not what I expected, having heard lurid stories of drugs, prostitution, and organized crime. The city had recently been the focus of violent industrial protest, and conflicts over land appropriation were common as the city expanded. 23

The picture Lai painted was very different: “There are no criminal gangs in China. Our country has few riots.” But someone was clearly worried about something. The police force, Lai said, was increasing every year and officers had to travel three to a car. Not long after, Chongqing was rocked by one of the biggest crackdowns on “black society” mobsters in modern Chinese history. Six gangsters were sentenced to death for murder, machete attacks, and price fixing. Investigators detained more than 1,500 suspects, including the deputy chief of police. 24

For dinner, I went to meet some of the city’s alternative thinkers at a riverside restaurant. This was a city that dazzled when night fell. The swirling surface of the Yangtze reflected a neon rainbow, brightly illuminated housing blocks, art deco skyscrapers, and motorway crash barriers that, for no apparent reason, glowed pink, green, and purple.

My dinner companions included a film director, a publisher, a poet/ cartoonist, and an environmentalist. They laughed at the notion that there were no gangsters, and some shook their heads at claims that the haze was just bad weather. Overall, they felt living standards were improving. Cultural development might be slower than material development, “but this is a city of the future,” said Li Gong, the poet/cartoonist.

“Compared with ten years ago, the air quality is better. But compare it with other cities in China or other countries and we are still far behind,” said Wu Dengming, an environmental activist who founded the Green Volunteer League and helped expose the illegal chemical emissions by local factories and pollution buildup behind the Three Gorges Dam.

Zeng Lei, a documentary filmmaker who spent seven years recording the lives of Chongqing’s poorest residents, related unhappy anecdotes of urban life: the bangbang man who burst into tears when he returned to his home village for the first time in three years; the housewife who felt so neglected by her family that she hired a team of bangbang men to carry banners through the city celebrating her birthday.

Song Wei, a publisher, noted that the evident problems—pollution, loss of heritage, inequality, and crime—were not confined to Chongqing: “We could be talking about almost any city in China.”

The similarity of China’s cities was a legacy of Stalinist state planning and a sign that aesthetics and heritage preservation were low priorities. During the Mao era, much of the nation’s building stock was hastily thrown up according to a tiny handful of designs. 25The economic reform period was barely any better. Although there was more variety, the rushed spirit of that age meant the quality of design and construction were often awful. At the county level, this created a tatty and tedious urban landscape of almost identical rectangular structures decorated with the same white tiles and tinted windows. As China became wealthier, cities looked to international architects for inspiration, but that often meant urban landscapes came to resemble those overseas rather than having their own distinct identity. Qiu Baoxing, the vice minister of construction, said the damage done to the nation’s architectural heritage was similar to that inflicted during the Cultural Revolution. “Many cities have a similar construction style. It is like a thousand cities having the same appearance,” 26he complained.