The one hour book on China Flashcards
1st Urbanization: China has 18.6 million people moving from villages to cities every year, almost creating another “Netherlands”.
China is a series of clusters. its top 20 city clusters represents 80% GDP and 60% population. infrastructure and road, rails are well connected within clusters.
Water is the biggest problem amidst urbanization. Chines agriculture uses 62% china’s fresh water, which is already a fairly small water supply. 40% of Chinese rivers are seriously polluted and unfit for use due to 75 billion tons of sewage and wastewater discharged into them (in summer of 2013, 2800 dead pigs were dumped upstream into river and floated into into Shanghai Huangpu river). 2/3 of chinese cities today are short of water.
To solve water supply problem, Chinese government initiated a multi-decade 62billion-dollar “South North Water Transfer Project” to divert water form the Yangtze river to Yellow river and Han river. The project is twice as much as the Three Gorges Dam. next stage is water conservation and treatment.
Construction is the industry where big money is located amidst urbanization. In China, 100 million people are directly or indirectly work in construction business. Investment in real estate rose from 120 bio dollars in 2003 to 980 billion dollars in 2011, which is 20% of total Chinese national investment in fixed asset.
In China, every year, 25% of steel, 70% of cement, 40% of wood, 70% of plate glass, 25% of plastics are used in real estate development and construction.
pre-fabrication(manufacture pieces of building at plants instead of pouring concrete on site) accelerate the real estate construction process in China.
Chinese urbanization is the largest social experiment ever seen by putting majority of chinese population into close contact with each other. the transformation will change the very fabric of chinese society on social, cultural and lifestyle norms.
