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| Available now from Zed Books |
Migrant workers live in the shadow of towers intended for
true city-dwellers Jianan Yu / Reuters Leo Lewis Published at 12:01AM, January
22 2013 250m... is the estimated number of people in China’s cities who do not
have the right piece of paper — the urban hukou — they need to live there
legally.
It is a deeply problematic figure for the Communist Party
and a source of resentment that has been boiling up since the Nineties. It
catches the authorities in what is, at best, a bit of grand-scale self-delusion
and, at worst, the conscious creation of a gargantuan underclass.
Last week, and without dwelling on the abrasively
two-tier quality of urbanisation, Beijing proudly touted the fact that the
population of China’s cities rose to 712 million in the course of 2012. It
keeps the country on course to reach a billion urban dwellers by 2030 and, in
theory, provides robust support for GDP growth in decades to come.
Such numbers are deliberately crafted to impress, an
intriguing new book on the subject argues, but ultimately are bogus. Because
migrant workers do not have local residence permits for the cities they first
construct, then later live and toil in, Tom Miller says in China’s Urban
Billion, they are treated as illegal immigrants in their own country.
Denied urban social security, schooling for their
children and a range of perfectly ordinary urban jobs (supermarket cashier, for
example), migrants without city hukou face a form of discrimination that leaves
them nominally urban but trapped as near-non-consumers.
Played shrewdly, and with a bit of swift, well-aimed land
reform and a shake-up of the system, these 250 million become genuine
participants in the biggest and most economically transformational migration in
history. Played badly, the same 250 million (and possibly more) become a
permanent underclass, gaping helplessly at China’s skyscrapers from slums that
expand to host a population the size of Britain, France, Germany and Spain
combined.
The problem is made worse, Miller writes, by urban
planners’
“impoverished view of modernity”, which demands that the
past be obliterated to make way for the new. China’s cities will continue to
shock and awe, he argues, but will struggle to inspire hearts and minds, a
challenge made even tougher if the new cities retain their halo of filthy air
(another symptom of poorly planned urbanisation).
But most crucial, he argues, is the long overdue reform
of the hukou system, a transformation dodged by successive administrations in
large part because of the astronomical financial strain it would place on city
budgets. Lifelong social security for each new urbanite would cost about
£10,000. If urban benefits and welfare were extended to 300 million migrant
workers over the next couple of decades, the bill would be around £150 billion.
It is not hard to see where the resistance to reform lies.
China commentary would not be China commentary without
the prediction of some massive, destabilising crisis lurking in the near
future. It is lodged firmly in the discourse, but Miller’s book is not in the
business of peddling doom. Its observations capture a nation urgently
squaring-up to a process that is morphing more rapidly, and with far, far
bigger implications, than any urbanisation that has come before.
For China’s leaders, there is no roadmap on all this
because a lot of the roads haven’t even been built yet: China’s Urban Billion
is the closest they have.
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