I’d always pictured China’s urbanization like an atomic explosion, rippling steadily outward from dense urban centers, swallowing up the rural surroundings in an ever-expanding circle. And to an extent, that is what it looks like. When I visited the country for the first time last week, I saw clusters of newly constructed towers popping up on the fringes of cities, like the ones in the picture below. That particular development is on the edge of Guilin, a city of five million people in China’s Guangxi Province. But drive about an hour beyond this area, and now you’re in peri-urban China — China’s exurbs, essentially, an unnatural-looking series of far-flung housing developments plopped into the midst of vast sugarcane fields and lychee orchards.
One of Guilin’s new neighborhoods, being built on a recently completed freeway just outside downtown.
Most of these towns are works in progress. Piles of bricks and cinderblocks litter the dirt front yards of suburban-style homes that look like little slices of Staten Island transported to the Middle Kingdom: beige brick facades, high-gloss dark-stained cherry wood front doors, and garages that many families — because they don’t own cars — have turned into open-air living rooms with couches and coffee tables. Other garages have been converted into shops that sell construction materials: bags of concrete, PVC pipes, lumber, more shiny cherry-wood front doors — materials that are used to build more houses, whose one-car garages are, once again, converted into shops selling construction materials to build more houses. It’s China’s constructocracy in microcosm.
It took the U.S. centuries to grow from urban centers to suburbs to exurbs, but China seems to be doing it in one fell swoop. A 2004 study found that these peri-urban areas are projected to add 250 million people over the next three decades. And just like in the U.S., the sprawl is encouraged by the government — mandated, actually, since the government controls all urban land use. What essentially happens is this: The Chinese government requisitions cheap rural land and converts it to “urban use,” which makes it government property. This new designation also makes it more valuable, which allows Beijing to sell it to developers at a profit. (Though the government isn’t really selling it, since there’s no private ownership of urban land — it’s just selling the right to use it.)
Many of Guilin’s exurbs are very much works in progress.
What this model does is create vast tracts of underused urban sprawl on land far, far away from city centers — land that has only been classified as urban because doing so generates revenue for the authorities. It’s not all nefarious — the little guy does have a chance of cashing in on this process in the short term. In the book China’s Urban Billion, Tom Miller writes, “In recent years, rising compensation for requisitioned land on the urban fringe has allowed a growing band of lucky former farmers to get rich.” Still, it’s hard not to wonder what will become of these places. In the U.S., we’ve seen in the last few years what happens to ill-conceived exurbs that were built in irrational locations. Should China’s urban boom stop short for whatever reason, these far-flung tracts of its urban geography may look less like an economic miracle and more like a bureaucratic boondoggle.
Photos by Will Doig
Will Doig was formerly Next City’s international editor. He's worked as a columnist at Salon, an editor at The Daily Beast, a lecturer at the New School, and a communications staffer at the Open Society Foundations. He is the author of High-Speed Empire: Chinese Expansion and the Future of Southeast Asia, published by Columbia Global Reports.