Shandong’s Urbanization Paradigm
Shandong has moreover provided the populace that has moved to cities and towns with fundamental public services, including education, employment, social security, health care, and housing security. The transformation of shanty towns and villages around cities by 2020 will also improve the quality of urbanization.
Shandong plans to build beautiful towns with local cultural features, and also to accelerate industrial upgrading, improve service facilities, and enhance the aggregation of population and industry. By 2020 the province will build a 200-km urban rail transit system and an 800-km utility tunnel. At the same time the urban wastewater processing ratio will reach 95 percent. Shandong will also optimize allocation of education, culture, sports, and social welfare institutions, and sanitation facilities.
Shandong is building a unified market of talents, capital, technology, land and other factors in both urban and rural areas. Through promoting the integration of infrastructure and public services, by the year 2020, Shandong’s treatment of urban and rural life garbage will be as high as 98 percent, and old age service facilities will cover the entire rural area.
The province will constantly improve crop productivity, as well as benign interaction of new-type urbanization and agricultural modernization. Shandong will strengthen rural environmental management and conservation of characteristic villages. By 2020, about 4,000 such villages will be built, and 50 percent of central villages will meet ecological standards.
Dezhou’s Urbanization Initiatives
Transformation of rural production modes and lifestyle is Dezhou’s new route to urbanization.
In 2007, farmers from five villages in Dezhou’s Ningjin County spontaneously merged their villages into one big community. Dezhou municipal government later launched an urbanization project in the area.
With a planned building area of 740,000 square meters, Yuanqiao is one of the nine major communities in Dezhou’s Economic and Technological Development Area, with a population of 12,000. Seventy percent of these residents used to be farmers in 10 villages in nearby areas. The first-stage project of the community covers an area of 9.4 hectares. By the end of 2010, 25 buildings were completed and ready for occupancy.
Constructing the Yuanqiao Community entailed expropriation of local farmers’ land and homesteads. Such farmers received RMB 150,000 in compensation for every four fen (1 fen= 66.67 square meters) of land. The living space standard for relocation was 40 square meters per capita. Houses in the newly-built community sold for RMB 680 per square meter. Most villagers, therefore, could afford to purchase and decorate a new house and also buy a no-frills car. Residents are not permitted to trade their relocated homes, but can be lessors.
Qiu Zhensheng used to be a farmer in Yuanqiao Village. He and his wife occupied an area of four fen. Qiu’s son’s family had a homestead covering three fen. The two Qiu households hence received a total RMB 280,000 in compensation. With this money they bought and decorated three 80-square-meter apartments, leaving them with RMB 98,000. Qiu rents out two of his apartments, which bring in an extra monthly income of RMB 1,000.
Dezhou Minfeng Technological Business Incubator Park, nearby Yuanqiao Community, has a planned area of 60 hectares. It will be completed in three stages. The first is that of the factory buildings covering 110,000 square meters which have already been constructed and leased. Land for the park was expropriated from 10 local villages. Chief of the park Yan Guohua believes that it is best to manage land in a centralized way. Pieces of land in different villages are usually small, which could restrict the construction area of factory buildings and so inhibit their attractiveness to investors. Centralized management of the land by the business incubator park also helps keep out low-end companies with small regard for environmental protection.
At present, most companies in the park are involved with new energy industry like electric vehicle manufacture. Each year, the park obtains more than RMB 10 million from land leases. This income is passed to the local government which then dispenses it to the 1,300 land-lost farmers in the community. In Yuanqiao, one whose farmland is less than three fen is defined as a land-lost farmer.
In addition to providing subsidies from leasing income, the park also generates job opportunities. “Locals can go to work in their neighborhood,” Yan said. Among the 1,100 residents who have moved to Yuanqiao Community, 70 percent have found work at companies in the incubator park. Simultaneously building a community and industrial park has created the scenario where locals reside in a community and work at any one of a cluster of companies in an industrial park located in an urban area close to their residential community. In the course of development, the industrial park has transformed farmers’ status from individual producers to industrial workers who earn incomes from both land circulation and their jobs in the industrial park.
