Urbanization in China Research Paper

Hanchao Zhang

Ms. L Dohner

Writing 111

March 18, 2015

Urbanization in China

Imagine that you stand in the middle of a city, right in front of the landmark building, with the colorful neon lights flashing, cloud-kissing skyscrapers surrounding; the cap of a bottled coca cola flicked out and the drink burst out again and again on the billboard, dazzling commodities exhibited in various stores which decorated with LED bulbs. Would this remind you of the lyric that:” Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, there’s nothing you can’t do.”? But if I you are the only person stood there, would it break the harmonious image that previously formed in your mind?  And what if I tell you that this thousands-of-acres city has only a population of less than a million, and you cannot afford the housing here due to the real estate bubbles despite the low population density, plus there is a food and water supply shortage in this city due to the fact that this city took over the fields for farming and clean water sources, and there is actually nothing you can do, would this concrete jungle still be where dreams are made of? Those may sound like scenes of science fiction movies and may be exaggerated, but this is happening.

In recent years, Chinese government has been setting the acceleration of urbanization as one of the most significant strategically developing goal. Urbanization was a process which transiting the agricultural industry (also known as primary industry) into industry (also known as secondary industry), service industry (also known as tertiary) and Hi-Tech information industry (also known as quaternary industry). Vocational change, industrial structural change and regional spatial change are included in the scale of urbanization. China has been entered into a booming period after 21th century and huge effort was put on urbanization and modernization during the past few years; however, in this process, some issues were embodied, and the drawbacks of accelerating urbanization caught people’s attention recently.

On one hand, some argue that the rapid urbanization does more harm than good, because, firstly, the developing at top speed neglects the evitable environment pollution, and those pollution may require even more funding in the future than what people now acquire. In this case, some news media pointed out that the pollution haze in most of north China leads to the fact that millions of people in China are breathing a hazardous cocktail of chemicals every day. These chemicals are caused by coal-fired power plants, factories and vehicles, and are responsible for heart disease, stroke, respiratory illnesses, birth defects and cancer. (Natalie Behring-Chisholm, Greenpeace.org). This may resulted from that China's cities are growing outward as well as upward, and the process consumed almost all vegetation-covered area, and there was no buffer zone between cities and undeveloped area under this "spreading pancake" model of urban growth.