Ming Jun snaps some dusty twigs and drags them indoors to cook lunch for his daughter and heat his mud brick home. The Chinese farmer is down to his last
Ming Jun snaps some dusty twigs and drags them indoors to cook lunch for his daughter and heat his mud brick home.
The Chinese farmer is down to his last pile of firewood, and he can’t afford any more. It’s just ahead of the Lunar New Year, but Ming says he feels no holiday cheer.
“Other families buy their kids meat to eat and new clothes to wear. My daughter wears old, donated clothes, ” he says dejectedly. “Forget it, I’m not going to visit other folks’ homes. I’ll just stay at home and sleep.”
Ming Jun’s village is just three miles outside Beijing city limits, in an impoverished belt of counties to the north and west of the capital. No other city in China presents such a stark contrast between its urban and surrounding areas.
Three years ago, President Xi Jinping announced a plan intended to help people like Ming. Xi’s signature policy goes beyond urban planning, envisioning an entire network of cities around the capital, a region with a population already one-third of that in the U. S. The plan would merge Beijing, the neighboring port city of Tianjin and Hebei Province into one mega-region.
He Lifeng, director of China’s top economic planning agency — the National Development and Reform Commission — which is in charge of the plan, says it will help fix what’s wrong with Beijing.
“Beijing’s air pollution, water shortage, traffic jams and other urban ailments, ” he told reporters in March, “are the result of it having taken on too many urban functions that are not essential to the capital.”
The plan would redistribute the resources that Beijing has for decades sucked out of impoverished villages like Ming’s. It would also connect Beijing and its satellite cities with high-speed rail. It would move Beijing municipal government offices to the suburbs to cut overcrowding. And it would relocate some urban functions and industries to Xiongan, a new industrial hub being built about 60 miles southwest of central Beijing.
The plan represents an attempt to create a northern analogue to southern China’s great urban clusters, one in the Yangtze River Delta, centered on Shanghai, and the other in the Pearl River Delta, centered on Guangzhou.
But Ye Tanglin, of Beijing’s Capital University of Economics and Business, argues that it will be hard to create an efficient and equitable mega-region by government diktat alone.
In Beijing, he comments, “the government allocates the resources, not the markets. The higher your official rank, the better resources you have.
