Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
dates to 1995. Shanghai now has the longest metro system on Earth—a system
capable of transporting 5 million people a day. I thought about the lack of public
transportation in my small town. I remembered that in 2010, China committed to
spend an additional $1 trillion on urban infrastructure by 2015. I considered the
words United States President Barack Obama used as he described, enviously, the
infrastructure in China, “their ports, their train systems their airports are all vastly
superior to us now.”
I looked at the student and said, “Basic infrastructure? But you have better
subway lines, high-speed railroads, roads, and airports than we do in the States.”
“Yes,” he said, “But I don't have hot water.”
A 2010 report in
Foreign Policy
agreed, “China's biggest urban challenge may
be water; already, it has little to spare. Some 70 percent of water use today traces
back to agriculture, but demand from urban consumers and commercial enter-
prise is on the rise. Even if the sheer amount of water isn't the problem, location
will be; the country will need to spend more than $120 billion on water systems in
the coming years to transport, store, and manage supplies.” A graduate student in
Beijing reiterated the water problem in China's cities. Her dormitory houses about
1000 students, but they all must walk out of the building to a central facility to
shower, and she reported that they are only allowed to shower between 2 and
4
PM
or between 9 and 11
PM
.
China's population of 1.34 billion people has been migrating to cities in droves
since economic reforms began in 1978. In 2011, the population of the world hit
7 billion people, with rising populations in China and India accounting for 40 per-
cent of the population growth. China has undergone incredibly rapid expansion in
its mining and manufacturing sectors, resulting in economic growth rates that are
often at 10 percent a year. But rapid economic growth took its toll on water quality
in China, which exacerbates water shortages in the country.
Providing services for 1.34 billion people is no small feat. Even though
demographers now predict China's population will stabilize at 1.4 billion by 2025
and begin to decline after that, shifts in the composition of China's population
will continue to challenge the provision of basic infrastructure to the country's
people.
Southern, coastal China has a moist climate, much like the southeastern
United States, but the climate in northern China is drier. With only 7% of the
world's fresh water supply, China has an uphill battle in providing water
resources to 1.34 billion people. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that
southern China has 80% of the country's water (
Foreign Policy
, 2011). To remedy
the imbalance, China is now building a $60 billion canal system called the
South-North Water Transfer Project that will include three different routes to
divert water from the Yangtze River in southern China to the cities in the north
(Fig. 2.2).
In this chapter, we examine the distribution of the world's population at sev-
eral scales in order to understand where people live and why they live where they
do. We also look into the continued growth of global population, noting that
growth rates vary quite widely across our planet. Even as population growth in the
wealthier core slows down to near (or below!) zero, it continues in the less wealthy
periphery, in some countries at rates far above the global average. No such discus-
sion would be complete without consideration of the health conditions prevailing
across the world: health, well-being, and population growth tend to be closely
related. And we will study the role of governments in their efforts to control the
process.
