Recently, mainland China has begun a major wave of county abolition and conversion to cities and districts. According to sources, in Jiangsu province alone, rumors have circulated that Rudong and Haian counties in Nantong city, Baoying county in Yangzhou city, Shuyang county in Suqian city, as well as Lianshui and Xuyi counties in Huai'an city, are pushing forward to"withdraw a county and establish a city (idiom); to divide a city into two counties and set up a city"Work.

7moon22Shanghai was officially held on"Chongming County was abolished and established as a district"Working Conference and will be published in the near future Chongming"divide a county into districts"The specific implementation program. This means that Shanghai has since entered the"Age of the Uncounty". Based on2015The statistics of the year, China2015The year has seen more than160Counties submitted for city and county abolition/The declaration of the district to the State Council, which implies that this year a big wave of promoting the urbanization process in the quiet preparation, perhaps the near future"counties"will become a permanent past tense.

Changes in counties to cities and districts

What are counties? Distinguished from traditional rural areas, a county is a form of transition from rural to urban, which is mainly based on the agricultural economy, and builds urbanization as much as possible in the process of agricultural economic development. Once a county reaches a certain target in a number of aspects such as economy, population, urbanization, etc., and the traditional agricultural model gradually changes to the industrial and urban direction, in this case, it will happen to abolish the county and change it into a city or district.

Whether it is the abolition of counties to districts or cities, this not only means that the local administrative level rises, incidentally, the county chief is directly promoted to mayor, local leaders in the treatment, authority, social status and many other aspects will be"escalate (in intensity)", a number of county units are interested in this"escalate (in intensity)"It's been salivating for a long time.

After a county unit formally steps into a city or district unit, local construction land, power and water supply, industrial projects, and funding allocations all present a"pledge"The promotion. Successful abolition of counties and reorganization of cities/After the district, the original county-level places will move towards an urbanized and industrialized direction. Hundreds of local units throughout China have now delivered to the State Council the"escalate (in intensity)"The declaration marks the beginning of a new wave of urbanization in mainland China.

A number of scholars have argued that China's inland urbanization is time-critical and needs to be accelerated gradually. China is undergoing an economic structural transformation, the success of which is directly related to the fate of the country, and a large proportion of rural areas will restrict the momentum of the country's transformation. At present, China's rural residents are backward in terms of consumption concepts and lifestyles, and the number of rural households accounts for a huge proportion of China's population. Only by accelerating the pace of urbanization and turning peasants into citizens can we help our country's economic structural transformation in a good and fast manner.

Imminent need for urbanization?

Is urbanization imminent? As things stand, rural wealth is far less than urban wealth. Even if urbanization were to be carried out in one step, it would still be difficult to motivate new residents to consume due to the meager welfare benefits and the huge sums of money that would need to be spent on many areas such as healthcare, housing, and education, which would only help China's economic transformation in a somewhat facilitating rather than a decisive way. Want to complete the countryside to the city a complete transformation needs at least a generation of transition, and waiting for this long cycle, the country's economic transformation of the key opportunities or long missed.

And, many of the units that have been removed from counties and converted to cities and districts have not really met the criteria for crossing over to cities and districts, strictly speaking, or China's years-old criteria for cities and districts have fallen behind the times. Many local units are even suspected of being forcibly dragged into urbanization. With economic development, the transformation of traditional agriculture-based county units into cities and districts is inevitable for development. However, some places have not met the standards but have been"denaturalization"of forcing a transition that doesn't yield much.

Xu Xianxiang, a professor at Sun Yat-sen University, collected1990until2007A sample of all the cities that have been abolished and established as districts in the past few years was compared with the changes in their economic growth in the two time periods before and after the abolition of counties and the establishment of districts. It was found that the economic growth brought about by the abolition of counties and the establishment of districts showed a decreasing trend from year to year, falling to almost zero in the fifth year. The short-term economic growth, however, comes from the construction of a large amount of infrastructure. The situation is similar in the case of county abolition and municipalization, where the main financial growth of the new municipal units comes from a large amount of infrastructure and housing construction, while industry, innovation, services, employment and many other aspects are almost unchanged.

However, the urbanization of"imminence"It still needs to be recognized. This is because the cost of urbanization in mainland China is still at a low level, and with each year's delay, the cost will rise sharply. Today, low-cost urbanization includes the low cost of rural land, the low cost of labor, and the low cost of the environment.

Forced urbanization is a form of plunder

Urbanization is supposed to be a natural law of economic development, and the current forced urbanization has a rush to the obvious"spoil things through excessive enthusiasm"behavior, which is aimed at launching a new round of capital plunder.

President Xi Jinping, General Secretary, has called for supply-side reform several times in a row, with the intention of realizing the road to a strong China by adjusting the growth model and structure. While many scholars have helped and emphasized the need for urbanization under the guise of policy, they are actually still following the old path. There are systemic flaws and uprooting urbanization has not changed the consumption structure and concept of the masses, the more frantic expansion and urbanization means an increase in real estate, infrastructure. The people will be all the money in the real estate and subsidized into the infrastructure, then this is not the old way again? Where does it serve the purpose of restructuring the economy?

Forced urbanization is a form of capital plunder, and it is well known that there is currently a single method of land acquisition and resettlement in mainland China, with very low compensation standards. Most of the huge incremental gains in land capital generated between the cost price and the transfer price of rural land are captured by middlemen. Not only that, but the lack of supervision by many local governments has led to serious confusion in the distribution of most of the compensation, with landless peasants actually receiving very little compensation.

Immediately after that, the urbanized peasants, who do not have a supporting security system in the process of integrating into the city, have once again become a new disadvantaged group. Due to a variety of co-existing problems such as educational background, financial vision, and poor long-term planning skills. Moreover, the self-sufficient rural lifestyle is not applicable to the highly competitive city."new citizen"The lack of various skills to survive in the city makes it very difficult to adapt, at least for a while. According to incomplete survey statistics, more than half of the"new citizen"After receiving compensation for land expropriation, most of the compensation is spent on consumer goods, such as luxury goods and automobiles, among others. Once there is not much money left and they do not have the ability to survive in the city, the loss of their land"new citizen"will fall into the ranks of yet another disadvantaged group, and as capital gradually solidifies, soon the lack of"network"The lack of survivability, the lack of nothing"new citizen"will once again be caught up in the cyclical whirlpool of exploitation.

People-centered urbanization

Urbanization is a major strategy in China, which not only facilitates the country's economic transformation, but also effectively reduces the gap between urban and rural areas. However, urbanization should not be a mad rush to build facilities and properties after changing counties to cities and districts. Urbanization should not be a blind pursuit ofGDPGrowth, instead of being centered on blind construction, should be centered on people.

The purpose of urbanization is to narrow the gap between urban and rural areas and improve the structure of the consumer economy. The urbanization of building a bunch of houses is not only getting farther and farther away from the original purpose, but also a bunch of empty houses and ghost towns have brought a series of problems of overcapacity in China. To narrow the gap between urban and rural areas and to improve the economic structure, we should start with the improvement of ideas rather than material improvement. The way to narrow the gap between urban and rural areas is not to give the same to the peasants to have a set of houses in the city, but to focus on rural education, focus on the skills training of the rural population, instead of simply exporting the peasants as laborers. Only through education or skill development in the rural areas with no or small differences from the cities can we synchronize our thinking with the cities, synchronize our incomes with the cities, and in other words, achieve the goal of"urbanization"The effect. Otherwise it is like buying a bunch of expensive stationery and quality school bags for a low achiever in the hope that this investment will enable the low achiever to catch up with the high achievers.

The expansion of the county units and the push towards urbanization or mergers have resulted in a rapidly changing cityscape, which appears to meet urban norms. However, because of lack of development and upgrading of skills and awareness, some soft facilities such as innovation, services and culture still cannot keep up with some of the"county to city conversion"The root cause of the zero growth for five years afterward and the growth in the earlier period by urban renewal.

Many European countries currently"ruralization"Still particularly serious, and even a number of national capitals are even more backward compared to some of our megacities. But many European countries with backward cities still have innovative economic drivers. A lot of money is invested in education and civic skills development, perhaps a bad teaching building may also come out of a number of world-class scientists and entrepreneurs full of innovative energy.

Urbanization should not be a frantic building of houses, a capital looting, and not for personal gain. Urbanization should first synchronize the farmers' thinking with the city, and then the supporting facilities should slowly follow, instead of the supporting facilities first, and then the behavioral awareness later.Mill! If you want to implement urbanization, please start with ideas!