Rural farmers are viewed as largely self-sufficient and unproductive when it comes to fuelling what will soon be the world’s biggest economy, outperforming the United States.
As the newspaper puts it, “China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years — a transformative event that could set off a new wave of growth or saddle the country with problems for generations to come.
“The government, often by fiat, is replacing small rural homes with high-rises, paving over vast swaths of farmland and drastically altering the lives of rural dwellers. So large is the scale that the number of brand-new Chinese city dwellers will approach the total urban population of the United States — in a country already bursting with megacities,” the paper says.
See the full story and video HERE.
Savvy environmentalists will tell you that the continued growth of cities around the world is not only unsustainable but is massively damaging in terms of natural resouce use. Most of the damage done to the Earth is due to supporting people and infrastructure in cities.
Movements are slowly underway around the world to try to encourage small, sustainable communities and in some cases revive communities and farms in rural areas. The Chinese authorities – long keen on grand but flawed schemes – want to do the opposite – accelerate the growth of their cities or megacities.
