China's 'Sponge Cities' Aim to Re-Use 70% of Rainwater
Asian cities are struggling to accommodate rapid urban migration, and development is encroaching on flood-prone areas.
China to Rev up Bullet Train Revolution with World's Fastest Service on Shanghai-Beijing Line
China will soon start official operation of the world’s fastest train service, knocking an hour off the 1,318km journey between Beijing and Shanghai.
More Than 100 Chinese Cities Now above One Million People
Government policy and a shift westward have fed the staggering scale of China’s urban ambitions—119 cities as big as Liverpool, and likely double that by 2025
A New Literary Genre Critiques the Scariest Part of Life in China: Reality
Enter chaohuan, the "ultra-unreal"
The Street of Eternal Happiness
from Sinica PodcastRob Schmitz, China correspondent for Marketplace, has been living in China on and off since 1995. He is the author of Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road, a book about the people living and working on Changle Lu in...
Street of Eternal Happiness
Modern Shanghai: a global city in the midst of a renaissance, where dreamers arrive each day to partake in a mad torrent of capital, ideas, and opportunity. Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz is one of them. He immerses himself in his neighborhood, forging deep relationships with ordinary people who see in the city’s sleek skyline a brighter future and a chance to rewrite their destinies. There’s Zhao, whose path from factory floor to shopkeeper is sidetracked by her desperate measures to ensure a better future for her sons.
Time Traveling Through Dramatic Urbanization in China Over Decades
Twenty-six years ago, only 26 percent of the Chinese population lived in urban areas. Since then, China’s urbanization rate has risen to almost...
China’s Secret Weapon on Disputed Island: Beer and Badminton
Soldiers, ships, and military outposts are the usual tools of nations staking out their territory. But on disputed shoals in the South China Sea, Beijing may be deploying a new arsenal: soccer fields, pipelines, and tea shops....
The Unreal, Eerie Emptiness of China’s Ghost Cities
Kangbashi is one of hundreds of sparkling new cities sitting relatively empty throughout China, built by a government eager to urbanize the country.
Xi'an City Wall: How China Turned A Military Site Into A Unique Park
Xi'an, China's 637-year-old city wall is a relatively new kid on the block.
No Ordinary Disruption
Our intuition on how the world works could well be wrong. We are surprised when new competitors burst on the scene, or businesses protected by large and deep moats find their defenses easily breached, or vast new markets are conjured from nothing. Trend lines resemble saw-tooth mountain ridges.
Fantasy Islands
The rise of China and its status as a leading global factory are altering the way people live and consume. At the same time, the world appears wary of the real costs involved. Fantasy Islands probes Chinese, European, and American eco-desire and eco-technological dreams, and examines the solutions they offer to environmental degradation in this age of global economic change.
Bulldozing the Cadre Who Revamped Kunming
Warm, sunny Kunming brimmed with charm before Communist Party leader Qiu He brought an autocratic style of governance to town and spurred the urbanization campaign that preceded his downfall.
Today, this historic city in southwestern China...
Shanghai and the Future Now
from Sinica PodcastExpats in Beijing may be partial to our rugged smogtropolis, but even the most diehard northerner will admit that Shanghai is the more romantic of the two cities, with its very name conjuring up images of 19th century opium dens, jazz bars in the...
Journeys Along the Seventh Ring
The story of Beijing’s Ring Roads is in many ways the story of Beijing’s urban development. The original ring (known confusingly as the Second Ring) was constructed in the early 1980s, at the behest of city planners, who, in embracing reform-...
Cities and Stability
China's management of urbanization is an under-appreciated factor in the regime's longevity. The Chinese Communist Party fears "Latin Americanization"—the emergence of highly unequal megacities with their attendant slums and social unrest. Such cities threaten the survival of nondemocratic regimes.
China’s Fake Urbanization
from Sohu
In China, ‘Once the Villages Are Gone, the Culture Is Gone’
Across China, cultural traditions like the Lei family’s music are under threat. Rapid urbanization means village life, the bedrock of Chinese culture, is rapidly disappearing, and with it, traditions and history.
Time for Overhaul of China’s Land Market
The expected launch of land reform is dividing opinions. At a work meeting this month, the Minister of Land and Resources, Jiang Daming, said the central government would limit land supply in cities with more than five million residents. His...
China’s Urban Dilemma
from chinadialogueAfter nearly three decades of rapid urbanization, China’s official and unofficial city dwellers outnumber its farmers....
Reimagining China’s Cities
After nearly three decades of rapid urbanisation, China’s official and unofficial city dwellers outnumber its farmers. China’s urbanisation counts as the biggest and fastest social movement in human history, a movement that has turned Chinese...
China National Human Development Report 2013
China had more urban than rural residents for the first time in 2011. The urbanization rate reached 52.6 percent in 2012, a major milestone with significant implications. In the midst of this urban transformation, China’s leaders have...
Is China’s Massive Infrastructure Spending Wise or Wasteful?
China leads the world in infrastructure investment. The new roads, new railroads, new skyscrapers, even whole new cities that seem to spring into existence every day leave little doubt that investment has been ambitious. But has it been wise?...
Pitfalls Abound in China’s Push From Farm to City
Li Yongping is directing one of the largest peacetime population transfers in history: the removal of 2.4 million farmers from mountain areas in the central Chinese province of Shaanxi to low-lying towns, many built from scratch on other...
Urbanisation: Some Are More Equal Than Others
Rural migrants living in the handshake buildings are still second-class citizens, most of whom have no access to urban health care or to the city’s high schools. Their homes could be demolished at any time.
As China’s Economy Stumbles, Government Eyes Reform
Urbanization and comprehensive economic reform are among the main hopes for supporting and improving the quality of China’s growth, as well as for commodity producers and investors globally.
Two China Cities Move To Cool Overheated Housing Market
In Shanghai and Beijing, stricter laws governing residence status and residence-related taxes in order to offset a real estate bubble that could seriously damage the economy and exacerbate social tensions between the rich and the poor....
China’s Post 1980’s Generation—Are the Kids All Right?
This week, the ChinaFile Conversation is a call for reactions to an article about China's current generation gap, written by James Palmer, a Beijing-based historian,...
Could Smartphones Help Clear China’s Congested Roads?
from chinadialogueThe extraordinary growth of China’s cities is well-known. Today, 160 Chinese metropolises have over one million inhabitants and more than half the population lives in urban areas, which are growing at two to three times the rate of Western cities...
China’s Urban Billion
from Sinica PodcastLurking silently behind practically every story on Chinese economic growth over the last thirty years has been the country’s unprecedented shift from being an overwhelmingly rural society to what is now a largely urban one, with almost 700...
China Gets Creative as the Cultural Revolution Grows
Costing a total of 50bn yuan (£5bn), this mammoth entertainment, retail and office hub, named the Han Street Cultural Centre, may be the most ambitious single project of its kind in the world. And it is being built not in Shanghai, Beijing or...
“Twitter Is My City”: An Interview with Ai Weiwei
Ai, who lived in New York for much of the 1980s, has become a patron of China's disaffected urbanites, and here, in his tranquil garden, he holds court, offering advice to the thousands of fans, bloggers, activists, and petitioners who visit from...
The Souls of Chinese Cities
Traveling through modern Chinese cities at times feels a blur, the view from a bus or taxi window seemingly untethered from any past or even particularities of place. In one sense, everything everywhere looks the same; it's easy to feel a little...
Beijing Forever
Beijing, as most Chinese know it, was a neglected relic after the Japanese occupation of World War II and the Chinese Civil War. In 1949, when the victorious communists moved the capital back there from Nanjing, it was a bankrupt town of 1.4...
The Soul of Beijing
from Sinica PodcastToday, we’re pleased to share a special live edition of Sinica recorded last Saturday at Capital M in Beijing. Held to a standing-room only crowd, we talked all about our ongoing love-hate relationship with Beijing, and asked what on earth is...