During observation and analysis, humans have a bias towards the more spectacular, the more conflictual and the bloodier side of things. Media and academia reflect this bias. What people know about China is based on what they read in newspapers and websites, as well as what they see in and hear about Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Knowledge derived from these sources is not necessarily erroneous, but it systematically overlooks the normal. This also holds true for the way we look at urban development in China. Even more ironically, this even applies to how Chinese policymakers in normal cities see their own development. In 2019 Martin de Jong, Yun Song and a few other fellow PhD students spent a few months in an average city in China and explored how politicians and planners in Yongcheng make their urban and infrastructure growth projections. What happens if you are Yongcheng and dream that you are Beijing?
What Big Data cannot do
Many academics revel in collecting empirical evidence online, especially in this era of impressive Big Data availability. These data can all be thrown into computer-based super models which help describe, explain and predict social and economic realities. We have learned to read and respect these approaches to scientific research, but they have never stolen our hearts. For us, there is nothing better than field visits allowing for fruitful fusion of smelling and observing the natural and social environments around us and personal interviews and discussion over coffee or tea in exotic sites under study. This goes hand in glove with developing a sense of wonder felt in public markets, engaging discussions with interviewing taxi drivers, spotting the (in)salubriousness of public buildings in popular neighborhoods and participating in (un)professional meetings with consultants and public servants with a particular eye for laying bare insecurities and inconveniences in facial expression and body language.
This basic attitude can sometimes prevent us from getting articles accepted in top journals, because replicability of the findings is indeed often questionable. On the other hand, it is unsurpassed when it comes to making reality checks, establishing the sense and nonsense of frequently made but thus far unsubstantiated claims and taking in recessive (rather than dominant) images of phenomena.
The average city where nobody goes
In times when superpowers throw mud at each other, media are eager to give in to stereotypes that please their political overlords, shareholders and passive readership, and when absorbing easy-to-grasp pictures of faraway worlds is the order of the day, it is crucial to keep offering these recessive images. We aim to do so here and do this specifically with regard to the average Chinese city which we call Yongcheng (“average city”, “庸城” in Chinese). The two of us and a few more of our colleagues spent a number of months there in 2019, conducting research on urban and infrastructure development. We made morning walks to inhale the local air quality. We had lunches and dinners with local officials who tested our capability to drink alcohol. We secured local cars to visit industrial sites which were or were not accessible to the public. We embarked on guided tours by speedboat to disturb wildlife living in and around pristine lakes, went through security checks in local railway stations and complained when our water bottles were confiscated and worked at frosty office spaces in winter kindly provided by the municipal planning bureau. Yongcheng is not a booming metropolis in the east of the country like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen or Guangzhou. It is not skilled at political protest like Hong Kong nor does it excel at offering gambling in massive halls with tacky golden chandeliers or putting Portuguese heritage on display, as does Macau. Neither is it located in Tibet or Xinjiang where most of us would like to go and inspect the real situation, but few are allowed (at least in conditions we are likely to accept). No, Yongcheng is just somewhere in the middle of the country. Everybody is allowed to go there, but nobody will. Its hotels are acceptable, but do not belong to famous international chains. It has lakes claimed to be the cleanest in the country, marshland ranked first in the province and forest-hills home to the rarest bird species yet hearing their names five times is still not enough to be able to reproduce them without stuttering. And Yongcheng shows economic growth, but its figures are not impressive: just average like everything else. Everybody in China shrugs their shoulders about Yongcheng and the rest of the world will never notice it. However, what happens in this city-next-door does represent how approximately 70% of the Chinese population lives.
Eco civilization at the local level
Yongcheng realizes and is generally pleased with 5-10% annual GDP growth in its local economy, but Party secretaries, Mayors and Vice-Mayors always strive for more and believe they will create faster career development if growth figures in their city are higher, if public uproar and protest can be kept at bay and if they do something conspicuous and positive for the natural environment. The city derived most of its prosperity in the past few decades from polluting petrochemical, chemical and manufacturing industries, but most people are no longer satisfied with its grey profile and the quality and output of its industries: too much manufacturing, too many threats to public health, too little exposure of its specialties to too few Chinese and international visitors, and not enough high-level education and high-tech services. However, Yongcheng has a dream: it is a dream of green growth. More economic value added at the expense of lower energy consumption, a higher share of clean tertiary services offered with less harmful emissions, more pristine nature reserves with more hotels and tourists and more science parks where more high-tech electric vehicles with larger batteries and airplanes with fancier control panels and dashboards are developed. It is the dream of the “eco city with Chinese characteristics”, but if you call it a smart city, low carbon city or circular city, they will also give you a grateful smile. Yes, that is what we mean. Just like Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Shenzhen have it. Richer, bigger, higher, faster …….. better and greener. The transport plan speaks of a traffic microcirculation where investment takes place in the more detailed underlying road network and in public transport. Perfectly in line with the eco-civilization the national leadership in Beijing has proposed. The microcirculation plan is useful and affordable and, moreover, politically correct vis-a-vis the national officials based in Beijing’s ministries. Unluckily, the implementation of this green plan was temporarily stalled: no money left. What Yongcheng actually did build was rather a 12-lane motorway leading straight from the city center to a brand-new administrative town and three new ring roads dramatically enlarging the city’s territory, all under construction: many young urban professionals including the higher-level functionaries had just bought apartments there. And they are proud of these new massive highways: they are much more expensive and thus far not as intensely used as hoped, but they are modern, match the hyper-optimistic population and economic growth projections the municipality has made for the coming years and provide demonstrable evidence of Yongcheng’s progress in the race of the peoples. If Beijing and Shanghai have many ring-roads carving up their territories, then so should Yongcheng. Richer, bigger, higher, faster. Better? Greener?
Yongcheng’s Great Hall of the People 10 x 10
Another defining feature of a successful city is having a super-deluxe high-speed railway station in its midst. Yongcheng was a latecomer into this game of bargaining for station areas and felt stressed-out for that reason. Eventually its lobbies in the provincial capital city, the nation’s capital and the national railway company proved successful. All is well that ends well. An environmentally friendly mode of transport of the 21st century finally makes its entry deep into the heart of Yongcheng City! The local officials had a different plan: why not locate this hallmark of infrastructure success and modernity as the anchoring point of a glamorous new town under development some two or three dozen kilometers outside of the city center? Finding a place downtown and renovating disserving areas would be way too expensive; but far out in the countryside expropriation and construction costs are low, the local revenues from new urban development are much higher and the station area can be made a truly massive and huge construction: hopefully large enough for the hordes of newcomers Yongcheng is likely to welcome in its midst as investors, employees, residents and visitors in the coming decade. Alas, once the central government issued a new guideline thwarting Yongcheng’s ambitious plans to build its impressive station out of town in the countryside, the municipal government conceded to a location only some 10 kilometers away from the city center. In that second-class case, at least its station hall should be designed to impress: it echoes the atmosphere of the Hall of the People in Beijing and plans on hosting approximately 10 times more passengers than the central government and national railways predict it would need. Richer, bigger, higher, faster. Better? Greener?
Usus fructus in Yongcheng’s ghost towns
Last but not least, the world also knows about those famous ‘Ghost Cities’ built in China since Wade Shephard first introduced this exciting phenomenon in his 2015 book. While the name is already bound to attract a fair amount of attention from critical and fun-loving observers, its empirical background is equally intriguing. The situation in Yongcheng appears to be no exception to the rule. The further Yongcheng is removed from the flashy East of the country, the more spirits and the less humans are likely to be found in the dwellings in these neighborhoods. This is simply because demand for real estate shrinks further and further when one moves away from the metropolis and more and more out of town. These so-called ghost towns are funded from national saving surpluses through financial institutions and developers that have nowhere else to go with their gigantic cash flows. If owning one house or apartment is essential to having a stable family life in an area where prime hospitals and schools can be found, for those of us who can afford it having two or three or even more dwellings at our disposal is still clearly the preferred option. As objects of financial investment or speculation, they do better than anything else. The central government has attempted to curb multiple ownership of dwellings through pilot projects with (very low) property taxes in famous cities, but when these proved highly unpopular the taxation experiment was stopped and the haves expressed a deep sigh of relief. Who said that Chinese consumers do not like unfettered markets? Later studies revealed that many ghost towns described in the literature eventually did fill up with buyers, but many of those actually turn out to be occasional visitors or at best temporary residents, having their main homes elsewhere and thus adding little to a thriving living area in the suburban and ex-urban neighborhoods where most new dwellings are built. But should Yongcheng’s population projections of 10 x 10 eventually prove to be more accurate than we can now foresee, these properties will no doubt fall into consumer hands in which case the usus fructus of dwellings will be decidedly more valuable than is currently the case.
Stagnation cloaked as expansion
The hard truth is that China’s national population has become almost stagnant. Its population may be immense and its urbanization process may be flabbergasting, but birthrates in most cities are remarkably low, with or without one-child policies. Those who can do so move urban and east and settle there, which means that resident numbers elsewhere should obviously be in decline. And they are: Ying Long and Shuqi Gao (2019) coined the term “shrinking cities” first in the Chinese context, where it was supposedly more revolutionary than in Germany, Italy or Japan of which most of us know that selective depopulation is in fact common in economically underprivileged parts of the nation. Cities in China most likely to be affected by population shrinkage are located outside of the great metropolises, and then especially in the northeastern, central and western parts of the nation. Nationwide investments in high-quality infrastructures and public facilities have only sped up this depopulation process further, in spite of widespread beliefs that rapid communication with Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chongqing or Wuhan would help smaller cities survive and prosper. The opposite has proven true. Yongcheng is not even a shrinking city; it is merely a stagnant one and therefore in average shape. It accumulates population from the countryside around it and loses it to larger and more powerful cities in the same province and elsewhere in the country. This is the numerical reality it lives in, but it is not the numerical reality it dreams in. If Beijing’s eco-civilization offers Yongcheng the language it speaks, its ring-roads and skyscrapers provide the images that float in the minds of Yongcheng’s policymakers and number crunchers when they revert to action. Dreaming the wrong dream is laudable in terms of ambition levels in politics and business, likelihood of forcing off promising career moves and keeping the growth myth alive, but it is costly in terms of financial and natural resources which are both beginning to run dry. The central government has noticed this and issued a variety of tentative regulations and guidelines to make illusory growth projections less acceptable and tame the construction frenzy, but to little avail so far. It is for demonstrating the unheard amounts involved in the losses resulting from this that we happily turn to the Big Data analysts: they can build our case for urgent transformation. The next step should then be to find policy incentives that reward and recognize modesty and down-to-earth attitudes in projections for future capacity need in infrastructures and real estate.
But one issue remains: how do we tell Yongcheng that it is ‘only’ Yongcheng?
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