China's Shanghai Sets Population at 25 Million To Avoid 'Big City Disease' (theguardian.com) 83
An anonymous reader shares a report: China's financial hub of Shanghai will limit its population to 25 million people by 2035 as part of a quest to manage "big city disease," authorities have said. The State Council said on its website late on Monday the goal to control the size of the city was part of Shanghai's masterplan for 2017-2035, which the government body had approved. "By 2035, the resident population in Shanghai will be controlled at around 25 million and the total amount of land made available for construction will not exceed 3,200 square kilometres," it said. State media has defined "big city disease" as arising when a megacity becomes plagued with environmental pollution, traffic congestion and a shortage of public services, including education and medical care. But some experts doubt the feasibility of the plans, with one researcher at a Chinese government thinktank describing the scheme as "unpractical and against the social development trend."
Why 25 Million? (Score:1)
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You are arguing a metaphor - not that which it describes.
I.e. "environmental pollution, traffic congestion and a shortage of public services, including education and medical care."
Which is something they predict they can still handle at 25 mil, but doubt that they will be able to at 30 mil.
And 25 mil is probably just another metaphor for "no bigger than right now" - as according to TFA "Shanghai had a permanent population of 24.15 million at the end of 2015, the official Xinhua news agency said last year."
Easy fix. (Score:1)
Offer free vasectomies and tubal ligations, maybe sweeten the pot with some cash. You will start to see results within the year.
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If 25 Million isn't a big city.... What the heck is? Seriously though, why 25 Million? Is it just because they have already burned past 20 million and are all, "Well, guess we can't kick people out now, so let's just call it at 25"? What "Big City diseases" can they avoid at 25 million that aren't happening at 30? And further, is this just Shanghi proper, or is this going to limit the Shanghi region which is already pushing 35 million people.
Tokyo is at 33 million and projected to reach 37 million by 2030. If you count the greater Tokyo area they are already coming up on 40 million meaning that they'll probably top 50 million by 2030.
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"Tokyo is at 33 million and projected to reach 37 million by 2030."
And they are all very sick, I guess.
At least according to the Chinese.
Or they just gave better public servants organizing everything.
And remember they don't even have zip-codes, nor house numbers.
Re: Why 25 Million? (Score:3)
Tokyo is vast, but its average population density is comparable to Los Angeles (i.e., nothing to sneeze at, but hardly Mumbai or Lagos). Out beyond the urban core, Tokyo is a seemingly-endless sprawling ocean of single-family homes with islands of greater density where a village center used to be before Tokyo swallowed it whole & kept growing.
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This is almost certainly referring to "inside the ring road", meaning within the actual city limits. Provincial Shanghai is not only growing, but is expanding its metro system to nearby cities, and has been looking to officially annex one or two of the nicer nearby cities.
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TsingTao is good beer.
About 20 years ago I tried another Chinese beer, SingHa (Almost the same anglicised name as the Thai malt liquor). It wasn't good, mentioned it to Chinese coworkers, was told. 'That's made in Shanghai with Shanghai city water, never drink that again, it will give you cancer.' They were surprised it could legally be imported to the USA.
Shanghai water issues have been unmanageable for a long time.
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Did you even read my post?
It's decent beer, wouldn't go so far as 'good'. Chinese 'SingHa' is polluted piss. I believe the Thai version has a space in the anglicised name.
Just making more cities (Score:4, Interesting)
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Chinese citizens don't own land.
Could have stopped right there. No one owns land in China [wikipedia.org], the best you can get is a 70 year lease on the land. You may own your apartment, but the land underneath? That's a lease.
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I never claimed otherwise. Perhaps you can show how a Chinese national can enter Hong Kong? What's required for them to enter Hong Kong? And how much currency can a Chinese person and a Hong Kong resident import or export annually? Why do they live under two completely different set of laws, immigration status, currencies, etc?
And why is BTC allowed in Hong Kong - but not on China? Which is what started the whole thing. China doesn't allow BTC; Hong Kong does. So you have ~7.5 million people in HK who
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You know plenty of places have school zones. And lots of people in those places buy houses in the area just to qualify for the school. It's not that controversial.
Are you still living in the 60's? how do you think the cities got so big if no one was allowed to move there? You still think people can't choose what jobs they want etc.?
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The Chinese system goes way beyond school zones. Like to the point where you (meaning the poor classes of course) can't legally even live in an area not designated by your Hukou. This is of course because of ancient laws meant to keep peasants actually on the land doing their job (enriching the landowners..)
The CCP is actually in the process of changing things a bit because those rules are starting to cause them problems as farming becomes more and more mechanized and they need workers in the cities &
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Welfare in China is paid for by the local government and not the central government. So if just anyone could move there it would be a massive burden on the city.
Usually you can transfer there if you get a job, pay taxes or buy a house.
They have been changing them for decades, and wi
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The ghost cities were a failure but I don't know if I'd call them an "epic" failure. They weren't primarily built to house people. They were primarily built to stimulate the construction industry (and thus the economy,) and to that extent they were moderately successful even if they've become a bit of an embarrassment after the fact.
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Controversial social experiments: The cultural revolution? Red guards? Ghost cities? Currency pegs?
We've tried them all but the ghost cities, you could have asked how they had worked out for us, or just studied the history. No need to repeat mistakes.
A precursor to China's future problems? (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's face it. Those who think China can replace the USA as the next superpower don't realize China has two issues they have to deal with:
1. Feeding, clothing and sheltering around 1.7 billion people--around 20% of Earth's human population.
2. A massive air and water pollution problem that is already affecting the health of many Chinese.
It's these issues that could result in health issues so gigantic that it could bankrupt that country within 20-25 years. This article is symptomatic of what will soon happen to China down the road.
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and when the factory's move to africa with it's lower min wage and lesser pollution laws??
Re:A precursor to China's future problems? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Feeding, clothing and sheltering around 1.7 billion people
Luckily, China has 1.7 billion people that can take care of that issue pretty well.
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They'll try, but given the persistent PM2.5 air pollution problem that still plagues many Chinese cities even as I type this (China will essentially have to either adopt US-style air pollution controls on its innumerable coal-fired power plants and/or switch to natural gas as primary fuel for electric power generation to drastically reduce this problem), that's not going to be easy to solve. And that's on top of water pollution from industrial wastes, too.
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Re: A precursor to China's future problems? (Score:3)
The pollution problem can be 80-99% solved with 25 years of sensible regulation. People forget that 50 years ago, cities like Pittsburgh & Cleveland were polluted as badly as China's cities are today. The rivers in northeast Ohio used to be ORANGE in some places, and the whole area had a perpetual "burning" smell, even on days when the pollution wasn't (as) visible. There were times when the pollution in Pittsburgh was *so* bad, the street lights came on mid-afternoon. Apparently, the Cuyahoga River thr
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But they did it the hard way: shuttering a lot of industries in the northeastern quadrant of Ohio. That's why northeastern Ohio has never really recovered once those industries started shutting down in the 1970's and 1980's.
Re:A precursor to China's future problems? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Feeding, clothing and sheltering around 1.7 billion people--around 20% of Earth's human population.
This is just stupid Goldilocks talk, we get that a lot on /. from people with no arguments... the nations in Europe are too small. China is too big. The US is different from everyone else and just right. Bovine excrement.
2. A massive air and water pollution problem that is already affecting the health of many Chinese.
Life expectancy is 76 years, far above the world average of 71.5 years and trailing the US by <3 years. China's GDP/capita is now around the world average, half the world is poorer than China and in total they're second only to the US. They have a huge net export ($500,000 million/year) and very low national debt (41% compared to 106% in the US). Basically they're already in good health and have a massive unused economic muscle they could use to buy polluting goods from others, create greener tech, subsidize greener tech, levy taxes on polluting goods they produce and so on.
Truth is that China is far from worst in class: Smog-cloaked Delhi looks with envy at Beijing's cleaner air [ft.com]. Not only particulates, but China's Sulfur Dioxide Emissions Drop, India's Grow Over Last Decade [nasa.gov]. Those are the two biggest local pollution issues. Their total energy consumption and CO2 emissions are growing [climatechangenews.com] but that's a global problem that won't more adversely affect China than anyone else. If you think any of these are "collapse of China" class problems you're wildly delusional.
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I have to disagree here.
Remember, China's land mass is only slightly larger than the land mass of the USA, but holds more than fives times the population of the USA. That's a recipe for a potential health crisis, especially given the persistent air pollution problem plaguing many Chinese cities now and the water pollution problem from industrial waste.
China has to address this problem over the next 20 years, and that's going to take very serious amounts of monetary resources to do so.
Re:A precursor to China's future problems? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It is highly unlikely that you have examples where it is normal for people to support their parents and grandparents.
Especially if those parents and grandparents have a pension and free health care.
Did you mean New Year celebrations are going to be a big headache?
How many average years of retirement are expecting them to get, where they have overlapping generations of retired people?
Limiting city development (Score:3)
Putting a cap on population growth is essentially what the certain areas of California have done, although at a much smaller endpoint.
Under typical historical circumstances, the concentration of economic activity would have led to high-density buildings and eventually skyscrapers and such, followed by construction of the systems to handle the higher density, such as subways. However, restrictions on construction in and around the Bay Area have locked most areas into low-density development. This restricts the resident population to either incumbent residents that bought in the past, or higher-earning newcomers who can afford the exorbitant housing costs. Infrastructure limitations also limit the size of the non-resident worker population that can migrate in/out on a daily basis.
Either way, it's an interesting social experiment in squeezing city-like economic activity into a suburb-like layout.
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The decisions made back then were based on the ability of buildings to withstand earthquakes, that residents didn't want to live in the sun-shadow of high-rise buildings, nor did they want MVA (market-value assessment) of a high-rise condo to suddenly blow their property tax valuation into the stratosphere.
Other cities across the world are now working on the idea of walkable cities, where shops, homes and offices are close enough so that everyone can just walk around.
Re: Limiting city development (Score:2)
Another disincentive: tall buildings that aren't public housing projects are *expensive* to build, even by Bay Area housing prices. In the Bay Area, there's almost zero demand for expensive residential skyscrapers, because the people who could afford to live in them & drive the market in places like New York and Miami don't want to live in them. And adjacent single-family neighborhoods that *might* tolerate an architecturally-spectacular tower for wealthy residents will fight a low-income housing projec
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A polar opposite of what is in China.
I rented a room on a 38th floor in a 42 floor tower where most of my neighbours were so so people for a snob like me.
The trick I was told is to pick flats to rent in very narrow buildings where you do not have more than two or three apartments per floor
Only super rich there live in detached mansions within city limits here
Cap at 25 million? (Score:2)
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RE: Public Transit suggestion ...
It is hard for me to imagine a more pervasive set of public transit systems than I encountered in China, from the undergrounds (in place and still being build in multiple urban areas), high speed trains, maglev, trams, buses, etc. Nonetheless, in the first tier city I was in (Shanghai) the streets and highways are in heavy use despite the options. And being a pedestrian can be a dangerous option where Mopeds drivers think (and act) as if they own the pavement where they cr