The article is interesting throughout, here is one good bit:
The foremost difficulty is immigration. In English we'd call it "migration," but our translators unfailingly used the word "immigration," and I began to see that it was the more accurate description of what was happening. Just as developed countries like the United States and members of the European Union face an influx of workers from the developing world, so does China: it's just that China contains both the developed and developing worlds within its borders.
The way China regulates this flow is not that different from the way nation states do. There is a residence permit called a hukou that anchors people to their home region by tying social services (healthcare, pension and, most important, schooling) to that area. But just as walls and laws have a hard time restricting human traffic from Mexico to the United States when the economic incentives are so extreme, so do the internal regulations of the Chinese state.
And this:
Pick any major city in America and start adding 500,000 people a year. It wouldn't be long before it broke under the strain.
Bombay (Mumbai) in India is a very goad parallel. Infrastructure is currently stretched very thin.
“Pick any major city in America and start adding 500,000 people a year. It wouldn’t be long before it broke under the strain.”
People don’t make that point often enough in the American immigration debates. The arguments tend to basically come down to arguments about race.
China in scale is much bigger (in population) than the US and Europe combined. Individual provinces are bigger than European countries and at least one, Szechuan, has half the population of the US. There have been times in the past when China was broken up into separate countries. We are not talking about a nice manageable homogenous country like France or even the United States.
So migration between provinces is very much like transnational immigration. The same applies to India as well.
Tyler, I’m not sure what you found in this article – it could have been written fifteen years ago (“China is growing at a blistering pace, but that cannot continue indefinitely because of strain on natural resources blah blah blah”).
Secondly, if I understood the author correctly he advocates a larger role for the state in the US economy as well – the Chinese are showing the way! (who’d tunk that from The Nation!). How many of those state owned companies are competitive on the world stage? Why did the state dominance of the economy in India produce nothing but dust and rot for thirty plus years?
@Steve – Stop hassling Tyler. He’s doing the best he can without getting his reputation trashed by people who can and do punish people for voicing politically incorrect ideas. Goading him will only force him further underground.
I was enjoying this article until he started commending the Chinese for their central planning. They centrally plan relatively well, they maintain strict quotas to make sure inputs aren’t diverted inefficiently under partial privatization, but their economy would be doing far superior under free market organization.
Not only that, but when you take away economic freedom you take away certain political freedoms.
Yet I’m supposed to be impressed by the benefits of their planning?
That an American city might “break” is more likely due to poor leadership than rapid growth. American cities tend to grow for reasons other than central planning. Yet, plenty of folks clearly advocate central planning on a national level. Because it works so well everywhere else it’s tried?
500k/year sounds suspicious. Which cities?
Various claims including http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-07/23/content_462662.htm and chart in http://ssrn.com/abstract=1153022 say Shenzhen has been the fastest growing for some time. I can’t find good figures, but would guess +500k in a single year to be the maximum.
Starting from a much bigger base I suppose it’s possible Shanghai has grown by +500k in a year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai#Demographics
Chonqing stats are wildly misreported all over — a minority of the “municipality” is urbanized. Other cities have the same affect to a lesser degree, including Shanghai.
2007-8 increases from http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/013426.html Dallas-Fort Worth (147,000), Houston (130,000), Phoenix (116,000) and Atlanta (115,000). Not 500k by a long shot, but not pushing any sort of limit as far as I can tell.
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