Voces leram bem:
250 milhões vão se mudar para as cidades nos próximos 15 a 18 anos.
Depois das
invasões bárbaras na Europa, nunca tantas pessoas se deslocaram em tão pouco
tempo...
Paulo Roberto de
Almeida
Para todos os gráficos, tabelas e ilustrações, sugiro ler o original:
LEAVING THE LAND
China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250
Million Into Cities
By IAN JOHNSON
The New York Times, JUNE 15, 2013
Articles in this series look at how
China's government-driven effort to push the population to towns and cities is
reshaping a nation that for millenniums has been defined by its rural life.
BEIJING — China
is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into
newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years — a transformative
event that could set off a new wave of growth or saddle the country with
problems for generations to come.
The government,
often by fiat, is replacing small rural homes with high-rises, paving over vast
swaths of farmland and drastically altering the lives of rural dwellers. So
large is the scale that the number of brand-new Chinese city dwellers will
approach the total urban population of the United States — in a country already
bursting with megacities.
This will
decisively change the character of China, where the Communist Party insisted
for decades that most peasants, even those working in cities, remain tied to
their tiny plots of land to ensure political and economic stability. Now, the
party has shifted priorities, mainly to find a new source of growth for a
slowing economy that depends increasingly on a consuming class of city
dwellers.
The shift is
occurring so quickly, and the potential costs are so high, that some fear rural
China is once again the site of radical social engineering. Over the past
decades, the Communist Party has flip-flopped on peasants’ rights to use land:
giving small plots to farm during 1950s land reform, collectivizing a few years
later, restoring rights at the start of the reform era and now trying to
obliterate small landholders.
Across China,
bulldozers are leveling villages that date to long-ago dynasties. Towers now
sprout skyward from dusty plains and verdant hillsides. New urban schools and hospitals
offer modern services, but often at the expense of the torn-down temples and
open-air theaters of the countryside.
“It’s a new world
for us in the city,” said Tian Wei, 43, a former wheat farmer in the northern
province of Hebei, who now works as a night watchman at a factory. “All my life
I’ve worked with my hands in the fields; do I have the educational level to
keep up with the city people?”
China has long
been home to both some of the world’s tiniest villages and its most congested,
polluted examples of urban sprawl. The ultimate goal of the government’s
modernization plan is to fully integrate 70 percent of the country’s
population, or roughly 900 million people, into city living by 2025. Currently,
only half that number are.
The building frenzy
is on display in places like Liaocheng, which grew up as an entrepôt for local
wheat farmers in the North China Plain. It is now ringed by scores of 20-story
towers housing now-landless farmers who have been thrust into city life. Many
are giddy at their new lives — they received the apartments free, plus tens of
thousands of dollars for their land — but others are uncertain about what they
will do when the money runs out.
Aggressive state
spending is planned on new roads, hospitals, schools, community centers — which
could cost upward of $600 billion a year, according to economists’ estimates.
In addition, vast sums will be needed to pay for the education, health care and
pensions of the ex-farmers.
While the
economic fortunes of many have improved in the mass move to cities,
unemployment and other social woes have also followed the enormous dislocation.
Some young people feel lucky to have jobs that pay survival wages of about $150
a month; others while away their days in pool halls and video-game arcades.
Top-down efforts
to quickly transform entire societies have often come to grief, and
urbanization has already proven one of the most wrenching changes in China’s 35
years of economic transition. Land disputes account for thousands of protests
each year, including dozens of cases in recent years in which people have set
themselves aflame rather than relocate.
The country’s new
prime minister, Li Keqiang, indicated at his inaugural news conference in March
that urbanization was one of his top priorities. He also cautioned, however,
that it would require a series of accompanying legal changes “to overcome various
problems in the course of urbanization.”
Some of these
problems could include chronic urban unemployment if jobs are not available,
and more protests from skeptical farmers unwilling to move. Instead of creating
wealth, urbanization could result in a permanent underclass in big Chinese
cities and the destruction of a rural culture and religion.
The government
has been pledging a comprehensive urbanization plan for more than two years
now. It was originally to have been presented at the National People’s Congress
in March, but various concerns delayed that, according to people close to the
government. Some of them include the challenge of financing the effort, of
coordinating among the various ministries and of balancing the rights of
farmers, whose land has increasingly been taken forcibly for urban projects.
These worries
delayed a high-level conference to formalize the plan this month. The plan has
now been delayed until the fall, government advisers say. Central leaders are
said to be concerned that spending will lead to inflation and bad debt.
Such concerns may
have been behind the call in a recent government report for farmers’ property
rights to be protected. Released in March, the report said China must
“guarantee farmers’ property rights and interests.” Land would remain owned by
the state, though, so farmers would not have ownership rights even under the
new blueprint.
On the ground,
however, the new wave of urbanization is well under way. Almost every province
has large-scale programs to move farmers into housing towers, with the farmers’
plots then given to corporations or municipalities to manage. Efforts have been
made to improve the attractiveness of urban life, but the farmers caught up in
the programs typically have no choice but to leave their land.
The broad trend
began decades ago. In the early 1980s, about 80 percent of Chinese lived in the
countryside versus 47 percent today, plus an additional 17 percent that works
in cities but is classified as rural. The idea is to speed up this process and
achieve an urbanized China much faster than would occur organically.
The primary
motivation for the urbanization push is to change China’s economic structure,
with growth based on domestic demand for products instead of relying so much on
export. In theory, new urbanites mean vast new opportunities for construction
companies, public transportation, utilities and appliance makers, and a break
from the cycle of farmers consuming only what they produce. “If half of China’s
population starts consuming, growth is inevitable,” said Li Xiangyang, vice
director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics, part of a government
research institute. “Right now they are living in rural areas where they do not
consume.”
Skeptics say the
government’s headlong rush to urbanize is driven by a vision of modernity that
has failed elsewhere. In Brazil and Mexico, urbanization was also seen as a way
to bolster economic growth. But among the results were the expansion of slums
and of a stubborn unemployed underclass, according to experts.
“There’s this
feeling that we have to modernize, we have to urbanize and this is our
national-development strategy,” said Gao Yu, China country director for
the Landesa
Rural Development Institute, based in Seattle. Referring to the
disastrous Maoist campaign to industrialize overnight, he added, “It’s almost
like another Great Leap Forward.”
“In a lot of
cases in China, urbanization is the process of local government driving farmers
into buildings while grabbing their land,” said Li Dun, a professor of public
policy at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Farmers are often
unwilling to leave the land because of the lack of job opportunities in the new
towns. Working in a factory is sometimes an option, but most jobs are far from
the newly built towns. And even if farmers do get jobs in factories, most lose
them when they hit age 45 or 50, since employers generally want younger,
nimbler workers.
“For old people
like us, there’s nothing to do anymore,” said He Shifang, 45, a farmer from the
city of Ankang in Shaanxi Province who was relocated from her family’s farm in
the mountains. “Up in the mountains we worked all the time. We had pigs and
chickens. Here we just sit around and people play mah-jongg.”
Some farmers who
have given up their land say that when they come back home for good around this
age, they have no farm to tend and thus no income. Most are still excluded from
national pension plans, putting pressure on relatives to provide.
The coming
urbanization plan would aim to solve this by giving farmers a permanent stream
of income from the land they lost. Besides a flat payout when they moved, they
would receive a form of shares in their former land that would pay the
equivalent of dividends over a period of decades to make sure they did not end
up indigent.
This has been
tried experimentally, with mixed results. Outside the city of Chengdu, some
farmers said they received nothing when their land was taken to build a road,
leading to daily confrontations with construction crews and the police since
the beginning of this year.
But south of
Chengdu in Shuangliu County, farmers who gave up their land for an experimental
strawberry farm run by a county-owned company said they receive an annual
payment equivalent to the price of 2,000 pounds of grain plus the chance to
earn about $8 a day working on the new plantation.
“I think it’s
O.K., this deal,” said Huang Zifeng, 62, a farmer in the village of Paomageng
who gave up his land to work on the plantation. “It’s more stable than farming
your own land.”
Financing the
investment needed to start such projects is a central sticking point. Chinese
economists say that the cost does not have to be completely borne by the
government — because once farmers start working in city jobs, they will start
paying taxes and contributing to social welfare programs.
China issues
different permits to urban and rural residents. Rural residents who move to
cities without city permits do not have access to public services. If the
Chinese government starts to provide services to migrants, spending is
projected to go up by 1.5 trillion renminbi per year, or 2.5 percent of urban
G.D.P. by 2025.
“Urbanization can
launch a process of value creation,” said Xiang Songzuo, chief economist with
the Agricultural Bank of China and a deputy director of the International
Monetary Institute at Renmin University. “It should start a huge flow of
revenues.”
Even if this is
true, the government will still need significant resources to get the programs
started. Currently, local governments have limited revenues and most rely on
selling land to pay for expenses — an unsustainable practice in the long run.
Banks are also increasingly unwilling to lend money to big infrastructure
projects, Mr. Xiang said, because many banks are now listed companies and have
to satisfy investors’ requirements.
“Local
governments are already struggling to provide benefits to local people, so why
would they want to extend this to migrant workers?” said Tom Miller, a
Beijing-based author of a new book on urbanization in China, “China’s
Urban Billion.” “It is essential for the central government to step
in and provide funding for this.”
In theory, local
governments could be allowed to issue bonds, but with no reliable system of
rating or selling bonds, this is unlikely in the near term. Some localities,
however, are already experimenting with programs to pay for at least the
infrastructure by involving private investors or large state-owned enterprises
that provide seed financing.
Most of the costs
are borne by local governments. But they rely mostly on central government
transfer payments or land sales, and without their own revenue streams they are
unwilling to allow newly arrived rural residents to attend local schools or
benefit from health care programs. This is reflected in the fact that China
officially has a 53 percent rate of urbanization, but only about 35 percent of
the population is in possession of an urban residency permit, or hukou. This is
the document that permits a person to register in local schools or qualify for
local medical programs.
The new blueprint
to be unveiled this year is supposed to break this logjam by guaranteeing some
central-government support for such programs, according to economists who
advise the government. But the exact formulas are still unclear. Granting full
urban benefits to 70 percent of the population by 2025 would mean doubling the
rate of those in urban welfare programs.
“Urbanization is
in China’s future, but China’s rural population lags behind in enjoying the
benefits of economic development,” said Li Shuguang, professor at the China
University of Political Science and Law. “The rural population deserves the
same benefits and rights city folks enjoy.”
A version of this article appeared in print on
June 16, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the
headline: China Embarking On Vast Program Of Urbanization.
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