Chongqing’s Challenge

Tom Miller

The Cairo Review of Global Affairs - November 24, 2013

China’s urban expansion is breathtaking. In 1980, fewer than 200 million Chinese people lived in towns and cities. Over the next thirty years, China’s cities expanded by nearly 500 million—the equivalent of adding the combined current populations of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Italy. Today more than 700 million people are crammed into urban areas, a little over half the population. By 2030, China’s cities will be home to one in every eight people on earth.
Nowhere is China’s urban transformation more striking than in Chongqing, the largest city on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, with a population of around seven million. Once a rusting laggard, marooned far from the dynamic cities of the eastern seaboard, this rough-and-ready river port is undergoing spectacular change.  Over the past decade, hundreds of towering apartment blocks have sprouted from the city’s deep red soil and new bridges have soared across its muddy riverbanks. Chongqing’s skyline, now a thicket of skyscrapers, resembles Hong Kong’s. And the construction frenzy shows no sign of slowing down. On the city’s northern outskirts, bulldozers flatten wooded hills and lush ravines to satisfy property developers’ insatiable appetite for land. Near the airport, teams of construction workers lay track on a new monorail that will eventually run to nine lines. And at the heart of the old city, wreckers armed with pickaxes hack at a tangle of grimy slums.

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