Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
by 2030. Put in another context, in twenty years China's cities will have
added 350 million people—more than the entire population of the United
States today. According to one estimate, by 2030 China will have over two
hundred cities with more than one million inhabitants (compared with
thirty-fi ve in Europe today).
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You can already see this explosive growth in
Shenzhen, in southern China, home to China's fi rst special economic zone
and its largest factory region. Here, the largely rural population of 350,000
in the early 1980s exploded to an “o' cial” population of more than ten mil-
lion in 2010 (the “true population” is millions higher) and it now has the
world's fi fth highest population density.
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China has indeed exemplifi ed the economist Joseph Schumpeter's pro-
cess of “creative destruction” as a political and economic force, destroying
far more of its older urban fabric in its twenty-year building binge than any
other nation has done in peacetime, far surpassing the losses, human and
physical, of urban renewal in the United States.
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By some measures, this
urban rebuilding constitutes the largest destruction of property in human
history. As the cultural critic and literary scholar Sheldon Lu suggests,
“Chai-na (literally, 'tearing down!') is indeed the proper name for contem-
porary China, as we witness the destruction of old buildings,” often on a
massive scale.
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h e example best known to outsiders is the destruction of
the old
hutong
neighborhoods in Beijing before the Olympics.
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In the con-
temporary Chinese city, the spirit of the master builders Robert Moses and
Baron Haussmann reigns supreme, but on a scale that far exceeds the physi-
cal and cultural impact of Moses in New York or Haussmann in Paris. h e
destruction is not contained within a single city or traceable to a single pow-
erful planner or bureaucrat, but instead has been unleashed by the full force
of the CCP itself as national policy, practice, and ideology.
Although there are clear links between the environmental history of
China under Mao and contemporary environmental change and urbaniza-
tion, what is truly unique about current-day China is the speed, scale, and
