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Posted by Kate Mackenzie on Aug 30 14:09. In our first post in this series, we examined the widely-held belief that China's steel demand will continue to rise at a rapid rate. FT Alphaville, along with others, contend that such forecasts are on shaky ground. This is, in part, because of the dubiousness of one of the underlying assumptions: that China will rapidly urbanise more of its population. (Here's a very recent example of this argument, from Stephen Roach.) The proportion Chinese living in urban areas just passed the 50 per cent mark in the past year but, the story goes, there is more to come. This will in turn mean more industrialisation, more modernisation, a bigger and consuming middle class and of course more GDP growth. In other words: [...] farmers who once led simple, subsistence-level lives now become factory and service workers in the city, reside in apartments furnished with appliances, occasionally eat out, and perhaps even send their kids to college. In the process, self-sufficient rural households are transformed into workers receiving higher wages and participating in the commodity economy of consumption. As such, urbanization is as much an economic and social transformation as it is a spatial and demographic process. Sounds great doesn't it? The above quote however comes from a paper by Kam Wing Chan in Eurasian Geography and Economics early this year. Chan is a professor of geography at the University of Washington, and he doesn't agree that this is how things will continue to play out for China.

The development of high-tech industrial parks (HTIPs) has become a salient phenomenon in China's economic and urban development. Current studies regarding the development of HTIPs tend to focus either on the active role of the local government or on the consequences of technological innovation that those parks may have brought about. Very few studies have paid attention to the intrinsic relationship between the process of space production in building HTIPs and the effect on urban development. To fill this theoretical gap, this article considers developing HTIPs as a territorial project through which both central and local states seek to promote economic growth by reorganizing their territories so as to facilitate capital accumulation based on building high-tech industrial parks. The authors use Beijing's Zhongguancun and Shanghai's Yangpu areas as examples to show the active role played by district governments in promoting and using the symbol of "high tech" to develop industrial estates. In the end, due to the HTIPs' quick tax-generating potentiality, their construction has given rise to commodity housing and commercial projects that district governments are much more enthusiastic to pursue. The property-led high-tech development projects have paradoxically generated a negative impact on sustainable high-tech development.