
Has China Reached Peak Urbanization? - tokenadult
http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-19/has-china-reached-peak-urbanization
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smallnamespace
Easy answer: no.

The US is 81% urbanized.

And here's a comparative chart of PPP per capita vs urbanization:
[https://theaspiringeconomist.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/urbani...](https://theaspiringeconomist.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/urbanisation-
and-income-per-capita-in-asian-countries/)

China's per-capita PPP is about 12-13k, so doing the obvious extrapolation
gets you a 65-70% urbanization rate (as opposed to the article's claim that a
60% target is 'too high').

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ChuckMcM
Beat me to it :-) I am curious how much better cities have to become in order
to achieve 70+% urbanization. Certainly massive gridlock and smog isn't going
to attract people.

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Hydraulix989
China's cavalier attitude towards smog and environmental pollution is
destroying the planet. I could never live there because you can't even see 50
feet in front of you in Shanghai; I've heard Beijing is much worse, but I
wouldn't dare ever visit because of health reasons.

Here's a photo outside of my hotel during my stay in Shanghai:
[http://imgur.com/xW9SoZP.jpg](http://imgur.com/xW9SoZP.jpg)

Surely, people don't want to migrate to urban areas in part because of the
smog.

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chishaku
> China's cavalier attitude

... and the cavalier attitude of those buying China's exports.

"A significant portion of Chinese emissions of air pollutants in recent years
has resulted from the manufacture of goods intended for export, new research
by a team of Chinese and international scholars found, reflecting the
increasingly global nature of China’s environmental crisis."

"The U.S., as a major buyer of Chinese-made goods, has a stake in China
curbing its emissions. For each of the pollutants examined—including sulfur
dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and black carbon—about 21% of
export-related emissions in the year 2006 were tied to Chinese exports to the
U.S, the researchers found."

“If all the emissions were reallocated according to where goods are
consumed…emissions of many of China’s trade partners would be much higher,”
they wrote. In the case of the U.S., for example, emissions of the four
pollutants analyzed would have been 6-19% higher in 2006 “if the emissions
embodied in its trade with China were included.”

[http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/01/21/u-s-exports-
it...](http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/01/21/u-s-exports-its-
factories-and-pollution-to-china/)

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Retric
Most of this air pollution is from poorly designed and operated coal
powerplants and poorly maintained cars not factory's. It's a problem of poor
regulation not exports.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Well, it isn't poor maintnence, but cheap maintnence. If you follow the rules
and your competitors don't, you are quickly out business. A classic prisoner's
delimna. For cars, the cars are fine but the gas they put in them is not.

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paradite
> A good step would be a program to deliver clean water to the hundreds of
> millions of Chinese who currently lack it.

Fair point.

> Another would be a national plan to control urban floods, like those that
> have afflicted central and southern China in recent weeks.

Uhm... This is not a simple task. When dealing with natural disasters, you can
only do so much to control it, and countries rather focus on the mitigation of
the effects. You cannot just "control floods" in China or "control hurricane"
in the US context.

> Finally, the government needs to reform the antiquated "hukou" permit system
> that prevents rural migrants from easily acquiring the rights and services
> that their urban counterparts are entitled to.

It is already happening. Give it a few years.

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Animats
China is trying hard to spread out its urbanized population to more cities.
Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong/Shenzhen/Guangzhou/Dongguan are just too
crowded. But it's not a "back to the land" movement; it's about moving more
people and industries to other cities, some of them newly built.

Of course, most people want to be in the big cities because that's where the
money and good jobs are.

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twblalock
It's more about moving people from the countryside, who have never lived in
cities, into cities. It is not so much about moving people from some cities to
other cities.

Incidentally, this is the largest and most successful anti-poverty program
ever implemented. People whose families have lived in terrible generational
poverty, in the same village for thousands of years, in some cases since
before the invention of writing, are now able to buy iPhones.

~~~
formula_ninguna
And unable to become free again: bank credits, cars, ads, junk food,
pollution, spying, different sorts of control, expensive medicine which
they're forced to use because of pollution and junk food, stress, telling them
how to live from mass media.

~~~
varjag
Free _again_? You call living in shit and mud for all of your (short) life,
not by the choice, a freedom?

Sure you skip invasive ads and pollution. But your diet is still abysmal, just
try living on rice and soy beans for a few months. The healthcare is poorly
accessible, while party control, spying, draft etc are just as omnipresent as
everywhere throughout China.

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emodendroket
Considering the efforts China takes to prevent people from moving into cities
from the countryside I'd say they've not reached any sort of natural bound.

