China planning megalopolis with 100m people

China’s urbanisation programme is the foundation on which the country’s economic boom has been built, and the reason why analysts are not too worried about the overall picture of Chinese expansion amid falling growth rates.

The Shanghai Tower, about which we have written before in this column, is opening to the public soon after seven years of building and more than €2 billion outlay, and it looks down from its 632-metre height on a part of Shanghai that will receive special treatment as part of a new Free Trade Zone (FTZ).

Now there are plans afoot to link up the capital Beijing, the nearby port city of Tianjin and the neighbouring province of Hebei into a city that will be as big as Uruguay and have a population of 100 million people.

The planned area will be called Jing-Jin-Ji, which is a shortening of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. When it is finished, the megalopolis will cover 216,000sq km and will have a combined gross domestic product of more than six trillion yuan (€860 billion), making it China’s third-largest economic region after the Pearl River and Yangtze River deltas.

Since the introduction of the high-speed rail link a few years ago, the coastal city of Tianjin is only half an hour away from Beijing and it has been growing aggressively in recent years by attracting IT and high-tech industries to set up there.

To succeed, the plan needs central government backing. Beijing's Communist Party chief Guo Jinlong said that implementing the Jing-Jin-Ji collaborative development plan should be included in the national government's 13th Five-Year Plan, and must study land use, urban development and environmental protection.

"We must take the plan as the most important political duty and deeply grasp the profound understanding of the strategic meaning, targeting and positioning of Jing-Jin-Ji," he told the Economic Information Daily.

Meanwhile, the paper quoted Wang Anshun, Beijing's mayor, saying he backed the plan as being within the "new normal" of economic growth.

The Jing-Jin-Ji plan has already been given initial approval by the Communist Party’s top decision-making Politburo in late April.

It looks like the 13th Five- Year national development plan, which covers the years from 2016 to 2020, is going to include a lot of these kind of free trade zones and transport links with neighbouring economies.

Trade zone

The Shanghai Free Trade Zone has been launched in the last few months, although there have been problems with how the reforms in the FTZ have been rolled out. Tianjin is also due to have an FTZ, alongside Guangdong and Fujian, based on experience drawn from the zone in Shanghai.

President Xi Jinping’s government has also rolled out a number of economic belts such as the Silk Road Economic Belt, the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, and the Yangtze River economic belt.

It's interesting that the government is stressing environmental co-operation, because seven out of 10 cities in China with the dirtiest air are in Hebei province around Beijing. Tianjin is another one of the cities with the dirtiest air, although Beijing has improved dramatically in recent months.