A purpose built community, with gleaming skyscrapers, leafy parks, and lake and mountain views.
It could be a glossy advertisement for a new lifestyle on the idyllic outer fringes of a major capital city anywhere in the world.
The development of Lanzhou New City, however, is the result of a massive project that requires flattening 700 hills in one of China’s most desolate, polluted and arid landscapes.
It’s all part of a nationwide, urbanisation plan to attract rural residents to cities.
China’s leaders hope that it will haul millions from rural poverty while creating a vibrant home-grown consumer market to bolster the economy.
For local governments, there is the prospect of increasing the value of unproductive land.
Located on the north bank of China’s Yellow River, Lanzhou New City is a state-level development zone northeast of Lanzhou, the capital of China’s Gansu Province.
Approved by China’s state council in 2012, it will cover 140,000 square kilometres.
ANU College of Asia and the Pacific PhD student Liang Chen says local government officials keen to score political performance points are likely to push ahead with development projects like Lanzhou, regardless of their feasibility or serious environmental concerns, so they can get promoted and or receive bribes.
“The political performance of government officials is linked to things like GDP, or how much investment they can attract to a local area,” he says.
As part of his PhD research, Chen is focusing on the social repercussions of China’s ambitious urbanisation plan.
From 2011 to 2012, he based himself in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province, in eastern China, where he interviewed 200 people in a night market that had been set up for migrants and new urbanites.
“I’ve seen the rise of middle class people, and of local criminals. I’ve also seen a lot of poverty,” he says of the experience.
Up until the late 1980s, the movement of people between urban and rural areas was tightly controlled by the Chinese government, in keeping with the Communist Party’s insistence that most peasants remained tied to their tiny plots of land.
From the early 1990s, a loosening of the Hukou, a household registration system which officially identifies a person as a permanent resident of an area, led to millions of rural dwellers seeking new opportunities in cities, mostly for economic reasons.
More recently, the Chinese government began actively encouraging the transition.
New urbanites 'tolerating' their lives
If current trends are anything to go by, China will be home to one billion urbanites by 2030. Far from being happy, many of the former rural dwellers Chen met in Nanjing were merely “tolerating” their new lives.
Some had received compensation for abandoning homes in areas earmarked for high scale development; disturbingly, many had been removed after putting up a fight.
He knows of instances where government officials employed “thugs” to force people off their land.
“As a consequence of this urbanisation, many farmers lose both their land and their livelihood,” Chen points out.
Those who find work in factories are often there short term.
“Factories can always find cheaper labour from rural migrants from all over China,” Chen says.
Some pick up work as cleaners or guards.
Frustrated by poverty and hardened by their experience, once they are established, it is not uncommon formigrants to bully newly arriving migrants, Chen says.
“Sometimes they hire their relatives to extort money from outsiders.”
In one instance Chen says a newly arrived migrant was told his stand at a market would be smashed unless he parted with a sum of money.
Success stories
But there are success stories.
One person Chen met in Nanjing, Mr Zhao, had been forced by economic circumstances to leave his home village, where he ran a restaurant, in the late 1990s.
For the first three months he was in Nanjing, he etched out a living at a garbage station, where he held his breath while shovelling waste and litter into trucks.
From there he accumulated enough capital to start a business.
“He not only sells food on the side of the road, he also managed to secure an indoor store in a good location,” Chen says.
Another man was considered a legend because in the space of just one year, he made enough money to buy his own apartment from selling smoked fish at the market.
But then he was pushed out by a competitor backed up by thugs. That led to him befriending a local hooligan, otherwise known as a ‘ghost’, so he could score a spot at another market.
It would seem that dreams of a new life in new cities are quickly becoming nightmares.
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