What Went Wrong With Our Cities, and Why Opinions About Them Are Always Sharp and Irreconcilable (Part One) | Living With the Future ⑥

Part one: what a city ought to be good at; where officials misread cities; and why, judging from the origins of the ancient Chinese city, Max Weber said China had never had cities at all.

“Sometimes the point is not to change the world but to explain it.”

At a moment like this one — when how we explain the world and how we live with the future are both in question — we need to hear wise, independent voices.

We asked our questions to more than 20 specialists in economics, law, sociology, communication studies and other fields.

The questions are many and tangled, but they bear directly on the lives the young will lead. Our interviewees hope the world left to the next generation works well and grows more civilized, and that in a confusing world people keep their independence and their reason.

Are there slums in China's cities?

The people who run cities care a great deal about this question: it touches their record in office and it touches stability. City residents are just as sensitive to it — filth, disorder, safety, the city's image, property values. A lot of their own interests ride on the answer.

On a wider scale there are countless disputes: between one city and another; inside a city, between the “new XX people” and the local population over resources and services; over the trade-offs among the services migrant workers provide, the resources they take up, and the city's image and positioning — between rich and poor, between those with a hukou and those without. And behind every policy that sets off these disputes, or that is bent by them, lies a different idea of what a city is.

People do not necessarily agree on how to understand our cities or how to understand the way they are governed. Those differences start easily enough with the slum question above.

Tang Shiping thinks that in China's urbanization, perhaps because the government is strong and can intervene early, China may have done better than Brazil or India — what he means is that our cities may have no large-scale slums. Zhang Qianfan agrees, but he also points out: “Compare China with the West, especially the United States, and you find that America has slums — above all in the downtown cores of big cities, which tend to be where the poor gather. In China that is uncommon. What we see instead is the enormous gap between one city and another, and between city and countryside. That gap will keep widening.”

Dai Jinhua says big-city economies rise and fall in cycles, so it is normal for urban slums to appear.

The shared ground was made plain by Zhang Yan, who comes from New York — a city with both towers and slums. He said: “You can tear down the countryside and put up a lot of towers, but what are the towers for? That's the question. Sometimes they build development zones, but no jobs appear. So the work is still in the big coastal cities, where the economy is [doing well]. I understand what the government wants, but [controlling the population] is very hard to pull off. They often have this image of the floating population: it rains, the water runs off in every direction, and someone says we should spread out, not all run to Beijing. That's fine — but how do you do it? They all live in Baoding, but are there jobs in Baoding?”

The chance to choose freely comes first. The right to pursue happiness and a good life comes first.

In an article written for the press, Xiao Han said: “On basic human rights and people's livelihoods, however complicated a problem looks, at bottom it is simple: treat people as people.”

That matches what Dai Jinhua told us. Her first reaction, she said, is that whatever else happens, she stands with the weaker side. “Between the strong and the weak, between those with power and those without, I don't think I could choose anything else. There is no other choice.”

This discussion of the city, which begins with slums, comes in two parts.

Part one covers what a city ought to be in the first place; where officials misread cities; and why, judging from the origins of the ancient Chinese city, Max Weber said China had never had cities at all.

What a City Is Worth

1) A city is made of people from every layer of society living here together; the way it works forms of its own accord

Ma Yong, Research Fellow, Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

I think a whole series of absurd things happened. As a scholar, none of it touches my own life — they can't clear me out, we have no signboards for them to pull down — but I still think it is absurd. It is trouble made out of nothing, and it “blackens” the system. Think about it: those signboards grew up over the years, and every one of them was legal. You say tear them down and down they come. Isn't that telling everyone the system is rotten, that it does whatever it likes? That is what blackens the system.

Then there's the “XX population” you want to clear out. That shows a basic ignorance of how a modern city works and how it comes into being. The city is a product of industrialization, a product of modern society. A city is made of people from every layer of society living here together, and the way it works forms of its own accord. To expect every one of them to end up in an apartment block, paying several thousand yuan a month in rent — that is impossible.

In fact every big city in every country has shantytowns like these; old Shanghai had them too. I live in Beijing, and the hourly cleaners my family hires can only rent houses that are about to be demolished. Wherever the demolition is, that is where they rent. No water, no electricity — a roof is enough. At first we didn't understand it either; after talking with them enough, we did. In a decent house, what they earn simply cannot cover the rent — or they feel that paying that much is money thrown away.

So how should this be handled? I think the best thing Beijing could do is build some cheap housing inside the Third Ring, inside the Second Ring, for workers at the bottom, and rent it to them cheaply. For one thing, it would give them a life with some dignity — no more hours packed into the subway. A few mornings on my way to work I happened to pass Line 1 coming in from Tongzhou: I shove you, you shove me. However much money you make, the dignity is gone. If these people could actually live near where they work, that problem would be solved too. And the whole order of the city would be different. Everybody has probably noticed this. Sociologists who study it professionally can surely put it better than I can. This isn't my field — I'm only offering a few impressions.

2) A dense, diverse city gives people more chances and more appetite to learn — and that is where innovation comes from

Zhang Bin, Research Fellow, Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

First, don't set urban renewal against counter-urbanization. Beijing really does need renewal. It has a great many urban villages. Much of Beijing's infrastructure is decent as hardware, but the services are poor. Start with the urban villages: land use in Beijing is extraordinarily wasteful. Excellent locations sit at very low density. Urban villages stay put for years with dreadful efficiency of resource use. That isn't a good thing, so they should be changed. Renewing the city and improving its infrastructure is still very much needed in Beijing.

But you have to know why you are doing it. You do it so that the people living in Beijing have an easier, more comfortable life and find the city better to be in. All the people living in Beijing — not only Beijingers but people who came from elsewhere — the city should be open to all of them. You renew a city to make it more appealing, more agreeable, so that people who want to come here live better here. Make it a place worth coming to.

I agree entirely with urban renewal, but it should be done in a way people can accept. Two examples. Right outside my door they are redeveloping an urban village — Beijing's largest, five or six thousand households. From what I saw, the whole process went well. They told everyone very early that renewal was coming, and there were bonuses. The earlier you left, the bigger the bonus; the later you left, the smaller. Once the rule was set it did not change; they would not cave in to whoever held out longest. The compensation satisfied nearly everyone — the signing rate reached 90-odd percent, 98, 99 percent. The houses came down, the residents moved out, and the result was decent.

Then look at the urban-village clearances in the suburbs. That whole business took a few months, half a year, and the preparation probably began earlier still. Then all at once, such an uproar. I think the methods were wrong. That doesn't mean a place that is filthy, chaotic and wasteful of resources shouldn't be redeveloped — it should. But after it is redeveloped, people should live better there. You have to be clear about what you started out to do.

Is there an optimal size for a city? Leave it to the market and a size will emerge on its own, because a city first of all pulls people in. Why do cities have economies of scale? Why does everyone want to come to a big city? Why does every great country in the world have great cities? Because a city is above all a dense place. Why does density matter? Because costs fall, and you can learn from other people easily. Second, a city is a diverse place. People come from everywhere, of every color. Why does diversity matter? Because I am not like him, you are not like him, none of us are alike, and you get to see a great many things that are not like you. Those differences create chances to learn from one another, and they create the appetite to learn. I want to learn; I see someone else doing something well, and I want to do it that well too.

Why do I keep stressing this business of learning? Because this is where new knowledge comes from, where innovation comes from; change starts here. Why does the city matter? Because through diversity and density it becomes a source of knowledge. And the spillover of knowledge is the most basic force pushing a whole society forward.

But density has a price, and too much of it becomes crowding. Once a city is overcrowded, costs rise again. The market itself exerts a force that settles roughly where a city's population lands. And is city size capped? Not necessarily. If my planning and design are good, if my urban services and public administration are good, I can hold more people. Even at very high density, if I manage it well, I can hold more people. If my management is a shambles and my services are a shambles, if I can't keep up and can't deliver, then more people mean congestion, household rubbish and pollution everywhere, and you cannot hold that many.

Our problem now is: why limit the population at all? True, a large population brings congestion and pollution. But is all that congestion caused by population? You can't see it that way. On density, Manhattan is ten times denser than Beijing, and many cities in the world are far denser than Beijing, yet they are nowhere near as congested. So where is the problem? Our public administration and services fall short of that standard, so congestion, pollution and every other urban ill stand out — and the answer becomes: don't come, I can't manage it.

You can see that when the government says it doesn't want people to come, it is admitting, in a roundabout way, that it cannot manage public services. Nothing to be done, so don't come. If we could make real progress in public administration and services, in construction and infrastructure, I believe our cities could carry many more people.

3) Urbanization is a consequence of industrialization

Wei Sen, Professor of Economics, Fudan University

On urbanization I take a different view. Look at the broad sweep of human history and you find that urbanization is a consequence of industrialization. Before industrialization there was no urbanization. Once industrialization arrived, people went to work in factories, and urbanization followed. My judgment then was that after 20-odd years of growth, China's economy had finished industrializing. What we are doing now — cutting overcapacity, clearing inventories, cutting leverage — is in effect de-industrialization. And when you de-industrialize, a large share of people are pushed into services. More restaurants, more foot-massage parlors — but the movement into the cities slows. So China's urbanization will slow, not accelerate. That is my basic judgment.

There is, of course, another view. Some say China's real urbanization rate is only about 61 percent, that it has to rise to 80 percent, that there is plenty of room left. But if you get to the city and there is no work, what did you come for? So my feeling is that urbanization won't arrive and real estate will run into trouble first. Developers build houses they can't sell, property goes through an adjustment, and China's economy keeps sliding.

Another thing: Cai Jiming and a good many others reckoned that China's genuinely urban population — people with a hukou, social insurance and medical insurance — was only 36 percent. Enormous numbers of workers earn money here and have none of it. Selling vegetables, sweeping the streets: the city's services are largely done by people without an urban hukou. Once Beijing cleared out the “XX population,” that group went home. They were never urbanized; they came to the city to earn a wage.

So Zhou Qiren makes this point: if you want to reduce poverty, the key is to reach the people who have come to the cities to work. Now that you've driven the “XX population” out, they go home, farm a few mu of land, and stay poor forever. In the city, how much more do they make than at home! A migrant worker goes home carrying tens of thousands of yuan. That is the real reason farmers' incomes in China have risen. The reason China's Gini coefficient and the urban-rural gap are not even wider is, to a large extent, the more than 200 million farmers working in the cities. They still earn less than urban workers, less than professionals — but far more than they would farming at home. Now this group is being cleared out and sent back, and China's wealth gap will widen. Nobody does it this way. But we say it is for appearances, for the look of the city, or some other reason. I don't approve.

A city is a spontaneous thing. What we are doing now runs against that; it has to be allowed to grow on its own. Everybody does the arithmetic: I may do all right in the village, but in the city I am a laborer. Even so, judged on income alone, working in the city beats farming a few mu in the countryside and pays far better than a job in the county town. That is the main source of rising rural incomes in China. Now we say we're going to develop the countryside in a big way — which amounts to saying: stop hanging around here, go home and work hard, build the new countryside, and you'll get rich.

And medical insurance, social insurance, schooling for the children — none of that has been settled. All the low-end work in the city is done by migrant workers. They receive nothing, and now you send them back. Beijing and Shanghai used to be so convenient; around Renmin University and Peking University you could eat at street stalls, and now there are hardly any.

Where Officials Misread the City

4) The city in many people's heads is a blank city, not a city full of people

He Weifang, Professor of Law, Peking University

One complicated thing about China, of course, is that urban land is not privately owned. So you find that anything at all can be decided on a whim. You find that the city in many planners' heads is not a city full of people but a blank sheet. They can take a ruler and put a road here. And here, an enormous city square. That makes the government more arbitrary still.

So when we draft a rule of this kind, have we given full weight to the principle of proportionality that administrative law keeps stressing? When you take such measures, what do you gain? What does the government gain? What do the city's residents gain? What do the businesses and institutions involved gain? Making that most basic case seems to me essential. Because if you don't make it, government becomes nothing but this: whoever has more power gets to reshape the face of the city as he pleases. That is arbitrary power, unconstrained power, and it will not do.

The other point is whether a hearing of some kind is needed before such a rule is issued. Does the people's congress, say, think it necessary at all? Or does it violate a higher law — the Property Law, for instance? Or other rules guaranteeing citizens' freedom of movement and protecting personal liberty from infringement — does it violate those? I think basic hearings are needed. Fierce argument, even, broadcast live on television and online, so that every resident can see why such a rule is being issued, where its reasoning lies, and what objections people have raised. That is the most basic requirement of open, democratic decision-making. Yet when Beijing issued rules like these, we never heard of them asking residents' opinions, never heard of them answering the questions or challenges raised by the city's people's congress deputies. A rule was rushed out and enforced just like that. And then a great many people were driven away. Driving outsiders away harms more than the rights and interests of the migrant population; it harms the interests of Beijing residents themselves — the people who rented houses to those shops, the service trades that made our lives so much easier, the couriers. Prices across the board have gone up. So a rule issued without any case being made for it is, I think, not the rule of law. Whatever kind of norm it enacts, however much it looks like legislation, it is entirely an expression of officials' will.

5) Urbanization in any real sense means turning rural people into urban residents

Guo Yuhua, Professor of Sociology, Tsinghua University

Population, the skyline, the environment — those three episodes at the end of 2017 are, to my mind, basically one problem. Why one problem? They all revolve around the city and around the government's management of the city. So I can treat them as three events with three faces, but in essence they are the same. The thinking behind them is one line of thinking; the form is the same form. They are all questions of urban management — irregular management, campaign-style management. Behind that lies a more fundamental question: what should governing a country, or governing a city, be grounded in? The two are really the same question.

First problem: China's urbanization contains a paradox. What is urbanization? Urbanization in what sense? Cities grow bigger, houses multiply — that is only the surface. Urbanization in any real sense must mean turning rural people into urban residents, not building the city ever larger while farmers stay farmers. The hukou system, the split between local and outside populations, the split between urban and rural hukou — all of it is the old system.

Under those conditions, what do you call urbanization? To me, urbanization ought to mean the urbanization of people. Urban construction, urban development, urban expansion, whatever you call it — all of it should be rooted in people. So I think Chinese urbanization contains a large paradox of its own. For these people it is an urbanization that cannot see them. When the building needs them, they are told: come work in the city. They are hands, they are labor. China's industrialization was the same.

They were never seen as people in their own right, or as people entitled to the same standing as every other citizen — only as pairs of hands. When you are short of labor you bring the hands in for services, industry, handicrafts, all sorts of work. Then a fire breaks out in the city, and because it seems to have something to do with their poor housing or their inadequate fire precautions, you drive them out.

I think this is really a question of the basic approach: you do it by administrative order, in one blanket stroke. The tearing down of “illegal” signboards is the same. What makes them illegal? They were legal when they went up — they surely weren't stuck up at random; there was an approval process and safety measures. Under what law are you taking them down now? You say it's for the sake of a neat, handsome city. The government gets to define what is handsome? What is beauty? Is that how it is defined? How? By what right do you define what is handsome?

Then there's the economics of it. Putting one up costs money. Taking it down also costs money. And taking it down leaves a mountain of rubbish. When they went up there was more than the cost of materials — calligraphy by a famous hand, for instance, had to be paid for. It was much like advertising, with commercial and economic interests in it. So the government uses coercion to interfere directly in people's production, their businesses, even their daily lives. Plenty of ordinary people can no longer find the place they are looking for; it causes real inconvenience. Once again, the one-size-fits-all mind.

The switch from coal to gas is the same. In the north, especially in the villages, winter heating has meant coal for as long as anyone can remember. The government says we are switching to gas — there should have been a whole set of arrangements. It is a systems job. Is the equipment in place? Is there enough gas? Can it be delivered on time? In the quantities promised? With none of that properly arranged, you go ahead with one blanket order, and put up slogans like “burn coal and you'll be arrested,” “sell coal and you'll be arrested.” That is beyond reason, and it left many people with no way to heat their homes in winter.

Look at how it was done and it is still the method of a campaign. Like the campaigns of old: an order comes down from above and is pushed down level by level. And you use a campaign to handle what is in fact city management, an economic activity, a matter of people's livelihoods. Behind campaign-style management lies a fixed idea, a fixed way of thinking — and it is not at all the thinking that reform and opening up was supposed to bring.

6) The government cannot judge for people where life is livable; that is each person's own judgment

Guo Yuhua, Professor of Sociology, Tsinghua University

What keeps a city's life running more or less normally? Behind that is something fundamental. Why did I just say this is the basic difference between market thinking and planning thinking? Because the government has always believed it can plan everything and arrange everything.

But the world is full of cities large and small, some of them enormous, and those cities formed relatively naturally. People feel they can get by in a place, live a fairly normal life, and so they stay. If they feel a place is not livable, that it isn't right for them, they may go elsewhere. The crucial thing is a guarantee that they can move freely. Since 1949 China has restricted movement. You were fixed in the countryside, or fixed in a city of a certain rank. It was all arranged by plan; you could not move freely.

That is still planning thinking, so people have no such choice. And there is always this scaremongering: open it up and the “blind drifters” will pour in. How can you decide in advance that farmers are “blind drifters”? If a farmer cannot make a living in the city, he won't stay in the city. Farmers are not fools. Going somewhere to make a living has its own foundation and its own logic — if he cannot survive there, he leaves. A few years ago everyone was talking about fleeing Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, then fleeing back to them. Why the back and forth? Because he judges where he can live. That, of course, has to do with the whole national system and the whole social ecology.

This is not something anyone can decide for others. However clever the brain, however wise and capable the government, can it decide for many millions of people what sort of life they want? How they mean to make a life they consider happy and dignified — how could it decide that? People should have the right to choose. Naturally a city needs public security, fire services, sanitation, urban facilities, all kinds of guarantees and arrangements. Suppose a lot of criminals turn up. Crime? There is law. Use the law against crime. What you cannot do is decide in advance that these people are “blind drifters” and a “mob,” and that if they come the city will fall apart.

I think the people of any country, any society, are oriented above all to staying alive. They want to survive, to pursue happiness, a life with dignity, a life a little better than before. That is the most legitimate human right there is. Ordinary people only make trouble when they cannot survive. Instability, disorder — those have their conditions. It is not the case that if you keep people out there is no disorder. Keep them out, and if they cannot live where they are, there will still be trouble. So this connects back to that fundamental question.

Power may not intervene in everything without constraint. And power may not escape all responsibility either. Look at power now: level by level it answers upward and not downward. Why upward? Because that is where the official's hat and his record come from — so the logic of the record in office is an absurd logic. One word from above is enough. Whether the thing is right or wrong, whether it can be done at all, he will force it through.

Complete my task, or over-fulfill it, and I reward you. Fail to complete it and I don't care why — I punish you. I call this the logic of “the King of Chu loved slender waists”: what those above like, those below carry to excess. Overdo it and you go unpunished; fall short and you are punished. Level by level, no one answers downward, everyone answers upward. Call it a bureaucracy or call it a structure of power, that is its defining trait. So this too is fundamental. Nobody counts ordinary people for anything; nobody truly puts people first.

7) Treating the countryside as a reservoir urbanization can drain and refill — this high-level instrumental thinking produces crude government

Ren Jiantao, Professor of Political Science, Tsinghua University

Through the whole course of urbanization, our cities absorbed rural people. Now that urbanization has entered a deeper stage, the city has begun weeding out surplus people — it has gone from opening itself to the countryside to closing itself off. So this is not only a matter of clearing out “non-capital functions”; more importantly it touches the great social event of “rural urbanization,” a public event affecting many millions of Chinese, and the question of how it changes over time. There are of course many important events along the way: the growth of education, economic transformation, and many matters that started as local incidents and drew national attention.

Because a public event is defined by those with a stake in it and those who might have one, there are large public events and small ones. Within a limited social range a small public event may draw no attention at all, yet it can still bear on people's immediate interests. Take the big cities: in the cleanup of urban order, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are all sealing up the doors and windows that were knocked through walls. That issue, alongside the clearing of the “low-end population,” was another event that drew public attention to how cities develop. When the market economy began in the 1980s, knocking a hole through the wall of an ordinary building to open a shop, and getting everyone into business, was one of the most important practices of China's market development. But by today it has turned out to be a low-end market economy: you can only knock a hole and run a small shop, and business at any scale is impossible. And now the country needs innovation, which this cannot supply. So now we plug the holes, block the doors, seal the walls. Knocking through walls has become a campaign to restore the buildings' original facades. And that has affected a great many people's livelihoods.

So in 2017 the major political public events and the social public events affecting people's livelihoods overlapped. In that sense 2017 may be a year worth remembering. Whether it will be remembered as a good year or a sad one, history will have to wash clean before its true face appears.

On China's urbanization, the first thing to affirm is that the overall process cannot be reversed. As China's economy develops, and above all as it shifts from an agrarian-commercial economy to an industrial-commercial one, the city becomes the knot in the whole system. But urbanization carries a very large difficulty, one that every country's urbanization has struggled with.

First, the disorder of urbanization's early stage. We open the cities, and surplus rural labor has to come in. But nothing was prepared: not the policy planning, not the supply of resources, not the separation of living space between old and new residents, not the allocation of urban resources. So urbanization became a chaotic rush in. Then, when urbanization reaches its genuinely critical stage, it becomes a process of transforming how a country allocates resources and institutions. In that sense urbanization is also a yardstick of a country's modernization.

At the critical moment, when urbanization demands that the allocation of resources and institutions be corrected and matched to its disorderly course, the real difficulty appears. In terms of stages, our country's urbanization is in the second one, moving from disorder toward order. Here it faces two great challenges. First, the city's capacity is already saturated. How to deal with saturation is the puzzle that leads to the second challenge: the supply of policy has to keep up. Long years of mediocre, lazy government have produced a certain crudeness in the way policy is carried out. Problems in the allocation of urban resources are settled simply and carelessly. Whether clearing out urban resources or urban people, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen all took relatively crude and simple approaches. Beijing simply drew more attention as the capital; Shanghai did it with more finesse and provoked no public anger.

But none of what Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen did was an urban policy or a resource plan formed in answer to the deeper stage of urbanization or the country's plan for modernization. In a sense this is closely bound up with the fact that we have not worked out how cities ought to develop, or what place, role and specific function urbanization holds within the country's modernization. And the institutional feedback tied to that is this: for a long time we have treated the countryside as nothing more than a reservoir that urbanization can drain and refill.

The reservoir idea was put forward in the mid-1990s by scholars working on the “three rural issues,” a group with serious ideas about the countryside, farmers and agriculture. But it is nothing more than high-level instrumental thinking, and high-level instrumental thinking is bound up with a certain low-level instrumental thinking. High-level instrumental thinking says: the city needs you, so come; the city doesn't need you, so go back. That is reservoir theory. What it failed to anticipate is that the farmers never intended to return to the countryside, and that the countryside could no longer take back the farmers the land had pushed out. They had already become new members of the city.

So how the city is to absorb them — where it finds new capacity and where it economizes — requires policy planning to match. And at that point the planning may produce low-level instrumental thinking. Low-level instrumental thinking works like this: because at the high level the countryside is the city's reservoir, no policy follows, and policymakers come to feel that farmers came to the city on their own and will go back on their own, which makes our policy response very slow. Even today we have not reckoned with the fact that urbanization cannot be reversed. So the reservoir idea is fundamentally misleading as policy. The result of that misleading is that we have no policy response at all to the irreversible flows of people, goods and money that urbanization sets in motion. Without such a response, we do not know how to lay out our cities.

Because in the agrarian-commercial era — and before reform and opening up we were all in the agrarian-commercial era — we used the dual hukou system to separate city and countryside completely. The result of that separation was that for a long stretch we were in effect stripping the countryside, agriculture and the farmers. And the result of that was no long-term agricultural policy at all. Indeed, when the city reached a stage where we could not make it a self-sustaining economic, social and political space, our answer was to send city people back to the countryside. That is the movement everyone knows best: educated youth sent up to the mountains and down to the villages.

So, lacking a stable, balanced, mutually consistent urban policy, we turned the city into an upper-class space to live in and the countryside into a lower-class one. In a sense, the only policy answer we could produce was to fix that discrimination in place through the dual hukou system. What we did not expect was that since reform and opening up the real political effect of the hukou system has been lost entirely. With that effect gone, people remain subject to hukou control but move regardless of it, and rural people and small-city people have poured into the big cities in enormous numbers.

Today's Ills, Seen From the Origins of the Ancient Chinese City

8) “China's early cities were not the product of an economic takeoff but instruments in the political sphere.”

Xiao Han, Associate Professor of Law, China University of Political Science and Law

“In comparing Chinese and Western cities, Weber put the political standing of the city's residents first; he went so far as to deny that China had ever had cities, because the ancient Chinese city was an instrument of rule and of the ruler's expanding power; for he held that only a city whose residents held political rights could be called a city.”

“All under heaven is the king's land; to the shores of the land, all are the king's subjects.” Those sixteen characters from the Book of Songs sum up a great deal of Chinese dynastic history — an outline of the national history, you might say. They made China a bureaucratic empire unlike any other place on earth, whose defining feature was the untrammelled willfulness of bureaucratic power embodied in the Son of Heaven or the emperor. For at least the nearly 3,000 years covered by reliable records, the fate of ordinary Chinese was usually one of precarious servitude. In that long river of history the fate of an individual before the empire — prominent or obscure, rich or poor, high or low — counted for nothing. In the eyes of emperors and their bureaucrats, people were not individuals but clumps, like weeds. Forced migration is the classic case.

After Qin conquered the six states, Qin Shi Huang, needing to build his new capital at Xianyang for a vast Legalist bureaucratic empire, invented a new policy: “he moved 120,000 wealthy households from across the realm to Xianyang” (Records of the Grand Historian, Annals of Qin Shi Huang).

As the structure of the bureaucratic empire grew more elaborate, this tyranny — which required a powerful apparatus to sustain — became systematic, and thereafter emperors moved populations around on a large scale as a matter of routine: to fill out the capital, to make control easier, and to strengthen the economy. “By the Western Han, ‘strengthen the trunk and weaken the branches' was not only a migration policy but a basic policy of state. Thereafter, from Wei destroying Shu in the Three Kingdoms and Western Jin destroying Wu, down to the early Northern Song destroying the states of the Five Dynasties, whenever one regime was destroyed by another a migration of some scale followed: the fallen monarch (if he still lived) and his family, his officials, the residents of the capital, even the main population of some important region, would be moved to the victor's capital or to some designated place — as few as several dozen or a few hundred households, as many as tens of thousands or over a hundred thousand.” Beyond this political forced migration there was penal forced migration: “Qin Shi Huang sent merchants and live-in sons-in-law to the frontier, several hundred thousand of them. Major cases in later dynasties often produced tens of thousands of exiles. Zhu Yuanzhang moved the rich households of Jiangnan to his native Fengyang and to the capital Yingtian (today's Nanjing) and kept them under strict control... Migrations of the surrounding peoples were often organized by ethnicity: the Western Han moved the Yue people into the land between the Yangtze and the Huai and settled surrendered Xiongnu on the northwestern frontier; the Eastern Han moved the Southern Xiongnu inside the passes; the Eastern Han and the Wei-Jin moved the Qiang, the Di and others into Guanzhong; during the Sixteen Kingdoms the Later Zhao and the Former Qin moved various peoples to the neighborhood of their capitals; the Tang moved surrendered Turks and others to the Chang'an region and moved Goguryeo households into the Central Plains; the Liao moved the Balhae people inland; the early Ming moved surrendered Mongols inland. Because these were mostly concentrated relocations the numbers were considerable, sometimes more than a million.”

Only by understanding the Eastern despotism that has come with Chinese bureaucratic politics from antiquity onward can one understand the peculiar problem of the Chinese empire. Karl Wittfogel's claim in Oriental Despotism, that Chinese despotism originated in the control of water, has not won academic acceptance; but the strongly despotic character of China he sets out in that book is beyond doubt, and the dynastic records bear it out. That China had, 3,000 years ago, already formed a bureaucratic network as society's dominant organizing force is scarcely open to dispute. That network became the right and left arms of royal and imperial power and society's decisive force, producing a bureaucratic empire in which politics, economics, culture, thought and art — nearly every sphere of national and social life — were run by the bureaucratic class, and it lasted for millennia. Wang Yanan, the economist who first raised the problem of bureaucratic politics, laid bare its consequences in his famous book 《中国官僚政治研究》 (A Study of Chinese Bureaucratic Politics): “Precisely because China's despotic bureaucratic politics mobilized or made use of every social and cultural factor from the start in order to widen its influence, the dominating, penetrating effect of bureaucratic politics gradually made itself into an inescapable net over thought and life, so that officials and people, rulers and ruled, everyone living under this political condition, came without noticing to regard this political form as the most natural and the most reasonable.”

What Wang Yanan is saying is that the ancient Chinese bureaucratic empire held an almost hypnotic power to enslave, which made it very hard for anyone sunk in it to break the shackles unaided — whether the shackles of institutions or the prison of ideas. The casual relocation of populations by emperors through the centuries is exactly a display of that capacity. This phenomenon also bears out, to a great extent, the historian Chang Kwang-chih's account of the origins of the Chinese city: “China's early cities were not the product of an economic takeoff but instruments in the political sphere — and rather than instruments for oppressing the ruled classes, they were instruments by which the ruling class acquired and held political power.” Chang's point is that the Chinese city did not originate in economics but in the requirements of rule. Behind it lies an implied comparison with the origins of the Western city, which did originate in economics. His insight largely corroborates the earlier judgment of the economic historian Fu Zhufu. Fu's use of the concept of feudalism followed old conventions and was therefore imprecise, and his claim that Chinese and Western cities sprang from the same source failed to distinguish itself from earlier accounts; but his view of the functions and roles of the ancient Chinese city remains sharp. His essay 《中国古代城市在国民经济中的地位和作用》 (“The Place and Role of Ancient Chinese Cities in the National Economy”), for instance, argues:

“One of the greatest characteristics of China's feudal system is that the nature of its cities and their path of development were altogether different from those of the cities of feudal Europe; and consequently the place of ancient Chinese cities within the whole feudal economic structure, and the part they played in economic development, were altogether different too.”

“The medieval European city was a center of industry and commerce, a free city outside the direct control of the feudal lord. Each city was an economic unit of its own, with its own administrative and judicial bodies, sometimes even its own armed force, minting its own coin and setting its own weights and measures... In China's feudal society, lasting some three thousand years, the political, economic and social life of all the people was from first to last under the direct control and interference of the feudal system, and a strict, complex, all-encompassing set of feudal norms — the ‘kingly system' — took shape very early as the theoretical grounds for that control and interference, passed down in an unbroken line for three thousand years and becoming a tradition everyone had to observe without the slightest deviation. Under the grip of that tradition, no person and no thing could stand outside the constraint and go its own way.”

The views of these two scholars have won support from a growing number of historians. Fu Zhufu's argument, through its comparison of Chinese and Western cities, also confirms the character of the ancient Chinese bureaucratic empire. Lu Xiqi, a historian at Xiamen University who studies the relation between history and space, takes a similar view in his 2014 collection 《中国历史的空间结构》 (The Spatial Structure of Chinese History). Endorsing Chang Kwang-chih's thesis, he says more plainly that the ancient Chinese city originated in power and in the need to proclaim legitimacy. He writes:

“Every dynasty in Chinese history mobilized vast quantities of labor and material to build central cities at each level, with the capital at the center. There were of course many specific considerations, but the most basic motive was still to proclaim the dynasty's legitimacy or orthodox authority, to make visible a state power towering over its subjects, and to seize more power across a wider space and a wider society.”

Lu's account of the origins of the ancient Chinese city also bears out Gu Zhun's comparison of Chinese and Western cities in his essay 《资本的原始积累和资本主义发展》 (“The Primitive Accumulation of Capital and the Development of Capitalism”). He wrote:

“China never produced a political entity founded on commerce, and never could have. China's cities developed very early, and so did its seafaring... China never lacked commerce... But China's cities, its markets and its shops were always under the dynasty's control — they were the dynasty's money tree, and the dynasty would never permit the emergence of a city or city-state founded on commerce.”

That is to say: from their origins through everything that followed, the functions of Chinese cities never changed much. This near-stagnation largely determined the basic character of the modern and even the contemporary Chinese city, and the difference in origin from the Western city — which produced city-state politics — marks the great divergence between Chinese and Western politics and economics. It caught the attention of the great sociologist Max Weber a century ago. Comparing Chinese and Western cities, Weber put the political standing of the city's residents first; he went so far as to deny that China had ever had cities, because the ancient Chinese city was an instrument of rule and of the ruler's expanding power; for he held that only a city whose residents possessed political rights could be called a city, and that a city's function must be political — political in Aristotle's sense of handling public affairs, not in the sense of the arts of rule. He wrote:

“Fundamentally unlike the West, the Chinese city, and all Eastern urban forms, lack the character of a city. The Eastern city is nothing like the ancient ‘city-state' (polis), nor does it have anything like the medieval ‘city law,' because it is not a ‘community' (Gemeinde) with political privileges of its own.”

Weber's argument bears directly on whether the Chinese city had any rule of law, and whether its residents had political freedom and political rights. These Chinese and Western scholars put it differently, but they point to the same thing: the ancient Chinese city originated in, and was held under, violent and arbitrary power. Economy, culture, the military, trade, the movement of people — in short, everything about the city — lay under the control of that arbitrary power, under its lash, even at its mercy for life and death. This is the plainest characteristic of the bureaucratic empire. The Western city and city-state, from ancient Greece onward, formed out of trade and out of communal life that grew of its own accord. The city-states of North Africa, the Greek peninsula and the Apennine peninsula — Carthage, Athens, Sparta, Rome, the city-states of Asia Minor — all took shape and grew in the closest connection with trade and seafaring. Even Sparta, which began in agriculture, turned to commerce because farming could not feed it. Those who governed a city-state were not the ones who founded it, and even the kings of Rome's regal and imperial ages held no violent authority to match that of the kings and emperors of the Chinese bureaucratic empire. According to Plutarch, Numa, the second king of Rome, overthrew the first king, Romulus, precisely because Romulus was too cruel; and having overthrown him, Numa immediately tried to rule in a more common manner and win back the people's trust. Publicola (Latin Poplicola, “one who cherishes the people”), who overthrew the monarchy and founded the Roman Republic, went further and razed his own mansion — property he had not gained through corruption — for no other purpose than to make the people feel he was no different from them. Athenian democracy and Roman law and constitutionalism were both closely tied to the origins of their city-states, and those traditions were carried on in Europe in a thin but unbroken line: the cities of feudal medieval Europe, the commercial city-state republics of Venice and Florence after the Renaissance, the constitutional revolutions of the Low Countries. “City air makes you free” catches the atmosphere of the medieval European city exactly; though often interrupted, it was never wiped out, and it survived even the rise of absolutist monarchy in the 17th century. Tocqueville notes in The Old Regime and the Revolution that by the 14th century “no taxation without the consent of the taxpayers” was already common talk in England and France — a legacy of Europe's urban tradition reaching back to Greece and Rome. In much of China today the phrase may still be unheard of. Why? The cities began differently, their first functions and purposes were different, they developed differently, and so they ended differently. As Weber said, China never formed a city in the sense of “a community holding political rights.” It has always been, and remains, an instrument of the ruler's enslaving rule and expanding power — whether in its political function of holding things stable or its economic function of raising revenue.

9) Down to the present: how the city's positioning and functions shape what we have now

Xiao Han, Associate Professor of Law, China University of Political Science and Law

Because of that difference, the countryside in every Chinese dynasty was only an appendage of the city. Besides harvesting taxes on industry and commerce from the cities, rulers relied — just as heavily — on cities of different ranks to tax and govern the countryside around them. So the urban-rural relationship of ancient China, a bureaucratic empire, could not possibly have produced a tradition of political and economic space in which city and countryside were roughly equal, as in England. It could not even produce the dual structure of feudal medieval Europe, with its “city of contract” and “countryside of status.” What it produced was what Hegel described: equal servitude beneath the emperor, city and village with no fundamental difference in legal standing.

It was precisely that political, economic and cultural structure of space — everything subordinate to rule — that made every phenomenon born of power exert a siphoning pull on everything else in society. The hukou system, meant to nail the farming population to the land and turn status into a tether, could not stop people far from the centers of power from streaming into the cities to make a living. Once a city was chosen by the rulers — whether newly built or long established — its power-based political, economic and cultural activity produced an enormous pull on resources: routine administrative spending, the ordinary lives of the empire's grandees, ordinary trade and commerce, the luxuries of high officials and nobles all created a fair number of jobs, drawing in the emperor's struggling and ruined subjects from round about. People who left their native places and roamed to survive were called, in those days, “drifters.”

Perhaps only against that background can one understand the enormous appetite for work and the extraordinary diligence that Chinese people, and especially Chinese farmers, have shown since Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up — even though, as the economist Chen Zhiwu says, for institutional reasons their hard work did not make them rich. It is the product of the instinct to survive, the experience of insecurity, and new hope and joy acting together. And so the city, as in every era of history and in every country in the world, once again became where Chinese people went to change their circumstances, and urbanization was naturally set in motion. In his well-known book 《城乡中国》 (Urban and Rural China), the economist Zhou Qiren captured this in a simple formula: the engine of urbanization is economic concentration outrunning the concentration of people. “When economic density exceeds population density, more people are bound to gather.”

But urbanization being driven by human instinct and economic law is one thing; whether a society's institutions are ready for it is another. Urbanization requires the basic institution Weber called “a community with political privileges of its own” — where “political privilege” means nothing hierarchical, but the basic rights of modern life: personal freedom, freedom of movement, secure property, and education, health care, social insurance, judicial fairness. Put another way, the city is a contractual arrangement among equals, not an arrangement of rank and status, and personal freedom, freedom of movement, secure property and judicial fairness are the preconditions of that contract. Yet the farmer who comes to the city to make a living under the hukou system, without freedom of movement, has no standing as a modern citizen free to enter contracts — in that sense his position has not improved markedly on that of the historical “drifter.” This is the basis for understanding the precarious fate of the city's outside population. The humiliating expulsions that guarantee them no personal freedom, the destructive treatment of their property, all rest on that fact.

In the same way one can understand why there have been so many laws and regulations restricting movement and providing for custody and repatriation. By 2002 more than 30 local regulations had been written specifically on the custody-and-repatriation system, and local regulations touching on it numbered 199 by the end of December 2002. The situation changed thanks to the Sun Zhigang case of 2003. Under strong public pressure, and with a degree of open-minded reflection by the incoming government, the State Council formally abolished custody and repatriation on June 24 that year; the custody stations became relief stations, and relief was required to begin with the person's own request.

Abolishing custody and repatriation was progress. The personal freedom of a city's outside population could no longer be stripped away at will, and although forcible expulsions of outsiders have continued to occur from time to time since, unlawful deprivation of personal freedom has clearly fallen a great deal.

Although a number of cities have dropped their local hukou restrictions and let people from the surrounding countryside settle, the megacities — Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen — still hold their hukou lines tight. For a migrant worker the big city is no place to stay for good. Without constant property there is no constant heart; the ladder upward is blocked; everything is done by halves so that money can be saved and taken home.

And so, in the giant cities and big cities where economic life is most vigorous, two things happen at once. Public services have neither the will to make life better for the outsiders at the bottom nor any practical action to that end; and those outsiders have neither the will nor the means to make life better for themselves. Squeezed from both sides, the outsiders create wealth for the city while making the rulers feel the city is swelling without limit and slipping out of control — schools, hospitals, housing, public order, transport, endless pressures they cannot meet. Unable to control it by ordinary means of governance, and dependent as ever on force, they keep producing these discriminatory, campaign-style crackdowns.

(Xiao Han's interview is taken from an article he wrote for the press; QDaily made some changes in excerpting it.)

(Further reporting to come.)

Interviewees in this report:

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image and banner: a still from the documentary Last Train Home. Source: Douban