"By 2030 Chinese cities will be home to about 1 billion people. Getting urban China to work properly is vital to the country’s economic and political future"
in today’s megacities it is some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers and largest shopping malls, interlinked by the world’s longest bullet-train network
After taking over as party chief in 2012, Xi Jinping (now also president) launched his expected decade in power with a catchphrase: “The Chinese dream”.
Mr Li Keqiang, who took over as prime minister in 2013, and other officials are fond of quoting Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning American economist, who said that technological innovation in America and urbanisation in China would be “two keys” to mankind’s development in the 21st century.
President Xi Jinping describes the country’s problems and his approach to solving them in colourful terms. Reforms, he says, have entered a “deep-water area”. China must “venture along dangerous paths to break through barriers to reform”. In tackling corruption it will need the resolve of a man who must “cut off his own snake-bitten hand to save his life”. At a plenum of the Central Committee in November the party declared that market forces must play a “decisive role”, the strongest support it has ever expressed for the market.
All the most important reforms that Mr Xi needs to tackle involve the movement to China’s cities. He must give farmers the same property rights as urban residents so they can sell their homes (which is currently all but impossible) and leave the land with cash in hand. He must sort out the mess of local-government finances, which depend heavily on grabbing land from farmers and selling it to developers. He must loosen the grip of state-owned enterprises on the commanding heights of the economy and make them hand over more of their profits to the government. He must move faster to clean up the urban environment, especially its noxious air, and prevent the growth of China’s cities from exacerbating climate change. And he must start giving urban residents a say in how their cities are run."
- China's manufacturing growth slows again in November (BBC)
- Economists React: China’s Manufacturing Sector on the Slide (Wall Street Journal)
Taiwan
"Pro-China Party’s Election Defeat Likely to Slow Cross-Strait AgendaOne factor in the shift was younger Taiwanese.
In March, the student-led Sunflower movement occupied Taiwan's legislative hall for the weeks."
Hong Kong
"Downing Street has said China was "mistaken" to bar a committee of MPs from visiting Hong Kong, describing the rebuff as "counter-productive"."
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