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Beijing is planning to combine nine southern Chinese cities into the world's largest urban area. Called the "Turn the Pearl River Delta into One" scheme, the plan will effectively merge Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan, Huizhou, Zhaoqing, Jiangmen, Zhongshan, and Zhuhai into a single megacity with a geographical size larger than Switzerland.
Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, is already considered the world's second largest metropolis with 24.9 million residents. The other eight cities in the Pearl River Delta plan will mean that the new unit will have a total of 42 million inhabitants. Add in the neighboring Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau, which some Chinese planners would like to do, and you have a megacity of 50 million people.
The PRD, as the Pearl River Delta is known to locals, is already an economic unit that accounts for a tenth of China's economy and a quarter of the country's trade by value. Government officials and private developers have already linked the nine cities with roads, tunnels, and bridges, but planners would like to see even more connecting infrastructure.
The idea is to spend 2 trillion yuan—slightly over $300 billion—on 29 rail lines running 3,100 miles. Inhabitants will zip from one urban center to another in an hour or less, a real feat because the area is separated by the wide mouth of the muddy Pearl River. There would be about 150 infrastructure improvements to enhance transportation, energy, water, and telecom networks.
Slums? Technocrats have not forgotten human needs in their grand plan. Not only industry but also public services will be spread more fairly with medical facilities and schools upgraded. Residents, for instance, will be able to use the internet to find hospitals with the shortest waiting times. The concept is that with size comes both efficiency—telecom bills, for example, will be cut by 85%—and the ability to bring resources to bear on problems—pollution is one of the problems that will be dealt with on an integrated basis.
Central technocrats officially deny plans to create one PRD megacity. Nonetheless, they admit to contemplating essentially the same thing: three adjoining "economic circles" of three cities each in the delta.
What's the motivation for the consolidation in whatever form it takes? At first glance, it looks as if local leaders want to put the PRD in a better position to compete with Beijing and Shanghai. The plan would also serve their interests by marginalizing nearby Hong Kong. Eventually Beijing wants the former British colony to be part of an integrated PRD—the city was included in a national five-year plan for the first time this year—but for the moment it will be left out of the nine-cities scheme.
Yet there is a darker aspect to the effort. Beijing for decades has attempted to tame unruly Guangdong province, long a thorn in the side of China's central leaders, and the PRD concept fits perfectly with President Hu Jintao's goal of exerting influence, "harmonizing" local officials in Chinese lingo.
The fierce competition among Pearl River Delta cities gives him an excuse. The inter-city rivalry has ultimately been good for economic development, but it has inevitably led to duplication. Mr. Hu is using the duplication to justify central control that planning naturally contemplates. As Guangzhou academic Li Zhigang says, "The central government wants to see a coordinated development of PRD cities under its guidance."
Under its guidance, central planners have all sorts of ambitious schemes. They are, for instance, planning to create across the country "small cities" of up to 25 million people and city clusters with up to 100 million.
Think that's big? The grandest of proposals contemplates a Bohai Economic Rim of up to 260 million people centered on the adjoining cities of Beijing and Tianjin. Technocrats and diplomats are also implementing regional plans to essentially merge the North Korean port of Rason into portions of China's northeastern provinces.
Beijing, which already created Chongqing with 33 million inhabitants, is changing the notion of what is a "city." In short, Chinese planners are ignoring municipal boundaries and looking to regionalization to create solutions. As management consultants sometimes say, if you want to solve a problem, make it bigger.
The Chinese government likes big solutions, but as Forbes's Joel Kotkin writes in "The Problem with Megacities," there are drawbacks to gigantism. And in China's case, there are simple fixes to urban problems. Instead of redrawing city borders and creating gargantuan units, for example, Beijing could remove the so-called hukou restrictions in order to permit people to live and work wherever they choose. If the Chinese people had the right to move from place to place, they would make and remake urban centers without the problems inevitably caused by straight-jacket central planning.
Do individuals, through millions of uncoordinated decisions, also make bad choices? As we see in the thousands of slums scarring the world, the answer is yes. Yet by their nature people also create competition that is the engine of growth. The trouble in Beijing at the moment is a desire for orderliness and predictability that will one day rob Chinese cities of the vitality for which they are now known.
Thanks to Gordon G. Chang / Blogs Forbes
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