Winton Dong

    dht620@sina.com

    IN April 1803, the United States bought the colony of La Louisiane (134,382 square kilometers) from the French Republic for the price of US$15 million, commencing the country’s exploration of the vast American Old West which extends from the Mississippi River west to the Rocky Mountains.

    Since 1803, Missouri, California, Washington, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma and many other states had been successively admitted into the United States of America. In 1912, Arizona became the 48th state and last of the contiguous states of the union (The United States now has 50 states including Alaska and Hawaii). This 110-year period (from 1803 to 1912) was not only the quick expansion period of the U.S., but also an important urbanization stage of the country.

    Urbanization does not necessarily mean that resources will be equally distributed in different areas. In my point of view, after hundreds of years’ industrialization process and urban competition, four global city clusters have ascended in the United States now. The East Coast, with New York as the center, mainly engages in finance and other high-end tertiary industries. The West Coast, with California as the leader, mainly develops high and new technologies. Central and western areas, with Chicago as the core, mainly concentrate on upgraded manufacturing and industrial transformation. Southern part of the country, with Houston in Texas as the engine, mainly supplies energy and agricultural products.

    Economic development and city expansion have brought about demographic changes such as great migration and suburban growth of mega-cities in the United States. With more and more people migrating from the countryside to cities or from less developed cities to more developed cities, many social problems, such as concentration of urban poverty, social isolation and physical deterioration, also have occurred. In 2016, American writer J.D. Vance published his novel “Hillbilly Elegy.” The book later became a New York Times Best Seller. It is a memoir which depicts the struggle and crisis of a poor white working family from the Rust Belt with Appalachian roots. The Rust Belt includes 14 states in northeastern, central and western America, which were once important industrial centers of the United States, but have faded away because of sluggish transformation.

    To avoid or decrease the concentration of extremely low-income families and reduce crime rates in poor residential areas, the U.S. Government has been taking pains to build mix-income communities in big cities. Such a process is called gentrification. Gentrification surely has its positive effects in scattering poor people and improving their living environment. However, because of different norms and behavior standards, such as public barbecuing, hanging out laundry, leaving shoes outside their doors, walking down the street eating cereal, stepping outside bare foot or in pajamas, relations between residents from various backgrounds also tend to be tense in these mix-income communities.

    Similar to the situation in the United States, after more than 30 years’ of robust economic and social development, China has formed three major city clusters — the Yangtze River Delta area with Shanghai as the core, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region with the country’s capital Beijing as the center and the Pearl River Delta area in Guangdong Province. The three mega-city clusters have attracted huge numbers of people and capital inflows from all over the country. Guangdong, which has a population of more than 100 million, has more than 22 million migrant workers mainly from Guangxi, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Hubei and Hunan. Beijing mainly attracts workers from Shandong, Hebei, Inner Mongolia and other neighboring areas. As for Shanghai, it lures workers from Zhejiang, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces.

    According to official statistics, China’s urbanization rate was 56.1 percent at the end of 2016. The figure is expected to reach 60 percent by 2020. This means that the trend of population inflow to developed regions is irreversible in China during the coming years.

    With more people coming to big cities, major challenges including reorientation processes, public housing services, air pollution, comprehensive health care and equal access to education are also arising in China.

    Moreover, since many Chinese folk traditions and solar term-associated events such as ancestor worshipping and other traditional ceremonies are held in the countryside, the survival of these traditions and inheritance from generation to generation is now under great threat as more and more people leave the countryside and move to urban areas.

    Despite the fact that some small cities and many villages have already disappeared or will disappear in China, every Chinese has the responsibility to keep our traditions alive. In order to deal with these challenges, big Chinese cities should also take actions as soon as possible and improve their performance in many aspects instead of focusing only on GDP targets and economic growth.

    (The author is the editor-in-chief of the Shenzhen Daily and guest professor of Shenzhen University with a Ph.D. from the Journalism and Communication School of Wuhan University.)