and planned to open a research center in Britain, where his daughter was studying at Oxford.
His creed was one of benevolent self-interest. He wanted his country to become a nation of consumers. “China is too poor. We need high-speed growth. The rich need to increase the income of the poor,” he said. “If we improve the living standards of farmers, then they can buy our motorcycles and cars.” Within five years, he aimed to more than double his workforce to 20,000. Next to the factory, bulldozers were already churning up fields for another plant.
It was the same story across China as land was gobbled up by factories, roads, and expanding cities. Between 1986 and 2000, about 1.2 million hectares of arable land were converted into built-up areas, mostly small towns of 5,000 to 10,000 people.9 The loss of farm fields was a common phenomenon in fast- developing countries, but while other smaller nations were able to offset this trend by importing food, this was not as easy for a huge country like China, which had to partly make up for the deficit by reclaiming more land from coastal waters, forests, wetlands, grasslands, and desert.10
Driving back from the factory, I counted more than thirty cranes in less than five minutes on the border between the countryside and the city. Just outside the Jiangbei tollbooth, farmers toiled under heavy loads in vegetable fields and women washed their clothes in a stream. Behind them, thirty-story towers were silhouetted against the gray haze. Where the two worlds met was a corridor of rubble as land was cleared for further expansion.
We made an impromptu visit at a building site, where Chen Li, a brash window fitter, kindly delayed his lunch to tell me about his work. He had arrived in the city nine years earlier at the age of sixteen. Since then he reckoned he had worked on between seventy and eighty high-rises. “The buildings are getting taller and better,” he said. The improvement in his life was not as evident. Chen lived in a hut on the site, his breakfast was a glass of soy milk and a steamed bun, and on an average day he worked eleven hours for about 50 yuan ($7). “I’m a city resident now. But life is still difficult.”
He was helping to build a city that seemed determined to overtake New York. The municipality was erecting a hundred skyscrapers, including the tallest in western China, the Chongqing Super Tower. Once finished, it will dwarf the replica of the Empire State Building that already rises up in the city center.
It was a similar story throughout the country. During the first quarter of this century, half of all the world’s new buildings will be erected in China. Fifty thousand of them will be skyscrapers, equivalent to ten New Yorks.11
I headed upward to the roof of a tower block, where I met Li Zhiguan, one of the millions now making a living nearer the sky. Formerly a farmer, then a factory worker, Li had recently become one of the many high-wire artists cleaning skyscraper windows, earning him the nickname Spider-Man. We met him at the top of a twenty- four-story telecom office just before he rappelled down the glass on a rope attached to him by a single clip. “It is 100 percent safe. You can go too if you wish,” said his boss, He Qing, with a strong German accent picked up studying for an MBA in Mannheim.
With so many towers going up, Li was never going to be short of work. And he had a bird’s-eye view of the transforming cityscape. “In six months, there have been huge changes. You can notice it from one week to the next.”
The skyscrapers Li saw rising up around him were better for the environment than urban sprawl. Tall, densely populated cities consume less land and allow for greater efficiency of transport, energy, and waste management.12 China was belatedly trying to reorganize its urban centers after decades of barely regulated expansion, particularly of small towns that threatened to reduce the nation’s farmland below the minimum that the government considers necessary for food security: 120 million hectares.13 To avoid this, the state aimed to concentrate more of the population in megacities and to halt urbanization in the less spoiled and most ecologically fragile regions of Tibet, Guizhou, Ningxia, and Qinghai.14
Done right, cities can ease humanity’s stress on the environment, according to the demographer Joel Cohen.15 They already provided homes for half the world’s population on just 3 percent of the planet’s land.16 An even bigger proportion could be accommodated if urban expansion was upward rather than outward, if there was good investment in public transport, and if energy efficiency was promoted through urban planning and architectural design. With an extra two billion people likely to join the planet’s population by 2050, the best way to make space for everyone is to house them in the sky.
But while compact, clean, vertical cities are the modern ideal in Europe, Japan, and Canada, urbanization in China has long tended toward the 1950s U.S. model of big suburban villas and commuting by car. Thomas Campanella, the author of a book on the country’s urban revolution, wrote that the differences could hardly be greater: “When it comes to the environment, China and the West are moving in opposite directions, and at blinding speed.”17 The result, he concluded, was sprawling inefficiency and worsening emissions.
In the future, the government wants to concentrate the population in belts of supercities, including one thick urban string that will thread its way up the Yangtze from Shanghai to Chongqing through Nanjing, Hefei, and Wuhan.18 To tie these conglomerations together, a high-speed railway is due for completion by 2012. That is just the start. Urban development looks likely to become more intense nationwide. The consulting firm McKinsey advocates the creation of dense urban belts between Beijing and Tianjin, Shanghai and Suzhou, and Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The Dutch architect Neville Mars envisages a day when city clusters will fuse together to create a superintense megaconglomeration stretching from Beijing to Shanghai and along the Yangtze.19
Chongqing was trying to set an example of how a city could grow big and stay clean. Its mayor, Bo Xilai, had earned plaudits for greening Dalian with lawns earlier in his career. Now he was trying to go one step further by creating a “forest city.” Such was the rush to plant urban trees that other regions complained Chongqing had left no saplings for them. The government also set aside an “ecological shield” region in the northwest of the municipality, from which people were encouraged to migrate to the inner city and alleviate population pressure on the Yangtze.
But the cleanup remained a low priority compared with economic growth. As people move off the land and into the sky, they produce less and consume more. In theory, they become socialized and civilized. In practice, they spend more time shopping and eating junk food.
A nearby shopping center could belong to any city on earth: pedestriani-zed streets, boutiques, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and a giant screen blaring out pop-jingle ads. As people buy, eat, and drink in ever greater quantities, they produce more waste. Dealing with that rubbish is becoming an ever more pressing problem.
I took a taxi into the hills to see the biggest of the megacity’s megarubbish pits: the Changshengqiao landfill. It was an awesome sight; a reservoir of garbage more than 30 meters deep and stretching over an area of 350,000 square meters, the size of about seventy football playing fields.
The waste engineer Wang Yukun told me the city produced 3,500 tons of junk every day. None of it was recycled. Some was burned. Here, it was layered like lasagna: six meters of rubbish, half a meter of soil, a chemical treatment, and then a huge black sheet of high-density polyethylene lining. Three years after opening, the site contained more than a million tons of rubbish.
Once it was full, the city planned to build a golf course on top. The day when people would be driving and putting on top of a mountain of garbage looked set to come sooner than expected. “The site was designed to serve the city for twenty years, but it has filled faster than we expected. I guess it will be completely full in fifteen,” Wang predicted.
The same was true for sewage and industrial wastewater, which was contaminating the giant reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam, a few hundred kilometers downstream, sooner than expected. As fast as the authorities were building wastewater plants, the pollution in the Yangtze was outstripping their capacity. The impact on agriculture and public health was estimated to cost Chongqing about 4.3 percent of its annual GDP.20
The story was common throughout China. Move farmers into the city and their consumption of resources increased threefold and their emissions surged along with their junk.21 By 2020, when the government aims to create a
