2012 NPC & CPPCC Sessions

Ren Qixing: China Should Pay High Attention to the Problems of Urbanization

( 2012-March-8 12:22:58)


 

By staff reporter ZHANG HUA

On the morning of March 7, Ren Qixing, deputy director of the Population, Resources and Environment Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and former chairman of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Regional Committee of the CPPCC, pointed out that China should pay attention to preventing and solving the problems associated with the urbanization.

The City is a symbol of human civilization. The Chinese government is undoubtedly justified in its mission to accelerate the process of urbanization in China and it has made much headway in this regard. Currently, China's urbanization rate is relatively low compared to the world's developed countries. With a quickening pace of urbanization and a growing urban population, problems such as traffic jams, unemployment, shortages of affordable housing and other resources, a widening gap between the rich and the poor, environmental pollution, disease transmission and a climbing crime rate have become more acute.

Ren Qixing says current policies are not doing enough to alleviate these problems.

First, he says, the government has not paid adequate attention to these problems. For a long time some policy makers have regarded the purpose of urbanization as solely economic development. By setting economic development as the only goal, they have failed to foresee and prevent the social problems arising from urbanization.

Secondly, Ren says the government hasn't made an overarching plan for the country's urbanization. Each city has followed its own GDP-focused urban planning agenda, and this has directly lead to various problems. Although the population density of major Chinese cities is not high compared with Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong, the problems caused by rapidly increasing populations in Chinese big cities have been magnified due to poor urban planning.

Thirdly, overly rapid urbanization has triggered many social problems, according to Ren. The rate of urbanization in the U.K. took 70 years to rise from 26 percent to 70 percent. In France and the U.S., it took 120 years for their rates of urbanization to increase from 25.5 percent to 71.7 percent and 25.7 percent to 75.2 percent respectively. In China, however, over 17 years the nationwide urbanization rate has increased from 28 percent in 1993 to just over 50 percent this year.This rapid change has left people for consideration of the problems that come with urbanization.

"I suggest the Chinese government makes a national urbanization plan and put more efforts into developing small and medium sized cities. In this way, we can avoid the problems of urban sprawl and unnecessary infrastructure construction, while at the same time, protecting cities' unique features and culture," said Ren.

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