Chongqing - The biggest city in the world
Taken from the Guardian
Chongqing is the largest - and fastest-growing - urban centre on the planet, with a population already bigger than that of Peru or Iraq. Yet outside China, hardly anyone has heard of it.
Jonathan Watts spent 24 hours in boom town
At some point this year, our species will prove Darwin wrong. For the first time since the dawn of civilisation, the human being is about to become a predominantly urban creature: humans have not evolved to fit our habitat, we have changed our habitat to suit ourselves. The planet's population is currently split almost right down the middle: 3.2 billion in the city, 3.2 billion in the countryside. But by the start of 2007, the balance will have tipped decisively away from the fields and towards the skyscrapers.
Nowhere is the pace and scale of urbanisation
faster and bigger than in Chongqing. Never heard of it? This is the
Coketown of the early 21st century - the world's biggest municipality,
with 31 million residents (more people than in Iraq, Peru or Malaysia).
Set in the middle reaches of the Yangtze, the former trading centre and treaty port has long been the economic hub of western China. It is now at the centre of China's drive to address the huge inequalities between the rich eastern coastline and the poor western interior. The scale of the "Go West" policy - with 1.6 trillion yuan (£114bn) spent since 1999, mainly on roads, bridges, dams and pipelines – is sometimes compared with the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild post-war Europe. To get a snapshot of this extraordinary boom, I spent a day in the megalopolis.
5.30am
- The bangbang man
In the hour before dawn, the poor district of Qiansimen has a distinctly Dickensian feel. With the rain lashing down, puddles fill the dark, narrow alleys, flanked on either side by tall, ramshackle tenements. An old man's wrinkled face glows orange as he warms himself over a brazier. Nestling between the port and the commercial centre, this is the home of Chongqing's most distinctive and traditional population - the bangbang army, a 100,000-strong crew of porters who bear the city's weights on their shoulders. Arriving from the countryside with no skills and minimal education, they pick up the cheapest of tools - a bamboo pole (or 'bangbang') and some rope - and hang around the docks, the markets and the bus stations waiting for goods to carry.
Yu Lebo has just woken up in the cramped three-room apartment that he and his wife share with three other couples. There are two double beds in one room, separated by a thin sheet, a third in a tiny room next door and another in the kitchen. "We want to move out and get a place of our own, but we don't have the money yet," he says. "I used to be a farmer, but I could not afford to raise my two children. So we left them behind with relatives. 1 see them two or three times a year." On an average day, Yu earns about 20 yuan (£1.50) for 12 hours' work. Most of this, and the money his wife earns as a cleaner, goes on rent and food, but as long as they stay healthy they can save enough to send money home to buy clothes and books for their children. It is vital. Education and health care - free in the days of Mao Zedong - are now the biggest burden on peasants.
The first job of the day is in the Chaotianmen market, where Yu carries several huge bundles of goods. Each is probably heavier than Yu, who weighs just over 50kg. The stallholder pays him 2 yuan (15p). "Not bad," Yu says. "Sometimes they are heavier. Sometimes we get paid less." It looks exhausting. Does Yu ever regret coming to the city? "No, my life is a little better than it was when I first got here. Then, I only earned ten yuan a day. This city is changing so fast. It is getting richer. Cities are good for the rich. If you have money you can do anything. If you don't want to carry something, you just hire a bangbang man."
10am
- The Industrialist
I drive to the city limits and the newly built Lifan Sedan factory in the Chongqing Economic Zone, where newly employed workers are putting together newly designed cars. "This was farmland a couple of years ago," says proud boss Yin Mingshan. "It is my 14th factory, 14 years after I started business." A dapper, twinkly-eyed 68-year-old, Yin is one of the nation's great industrial pioneers, the 21st century Chinese equivalent to Titus Salt, Josiah Wedgwood or the Cadbury brothers. Imprisoned for much of the Mao era for his views on free speech and capitalism, he set up a motorcycle repair company in 1992 with nine staff. His Lifan company now employs 9,000 workers and has a turnover of 7.3bn yuan (£521m)."China has become a wonderland for entrepreneurs," says Yin. "There arc many people who are doing what I have done."
Chongqing is famous for motorbikes. Yin is now also trying to make it famous for cars, by buying a BMW-Chrysler factory in Brazil, breaking it down, shipping it up the Yangtze and then rebuilding it in Chongqing. He has also set up plants in Vietnam, Thailand and Bulgaria, and plans to open a research centre in Britain, where his daughter studies at Oxford. His creed is one of benevolent self-interest. "China is too poor. We need high-speed growth," he says. "If we improve the living standards of peasants, then they can buy our motorcycles and cars."
12pm
- The builder
Even by the standards of the giant construction
site that is modern-day China, Chongqing's building frenzy is
impressive. If today is typical, builders will lay 137,000 square
metres of new floor space for residential blocks, shopping centres and
factories. The city has eight new railways, eight highways and eight
bridges. The port is in the midst of a £1.15bn redevelopment and
the airport's capacity is planned to quintuple by 2010. Chen Li, a
window-fitter, reckons he has worked on 70 to 80 tower blocks in the
nine years since he arrived in the city. "The buildings are getting
taller and better," he says. Yet he lives in a hut, his breakfast is a
glass of soya milk and a steamed bun, and on an average day he works 11
hours for about 50 yuan (£3.60). "I'm a city resident now. But
life is still difficult."3pm
- The psychologist
China's growing gap between winners and losers has created an intensely competitive, restless society where stress and conflict are the norm. How do people cope? Kuang Li is a psychologist at a hospital affiliated to Chongqing University of Medical Science. She has no couch: instead, this is the most formal interview of the day, in a special reception room, flanked by hospital and government officials. Kuang is upbeat. "People have to make a big adjustment because the pace of life, work and study are all accelerating. It puts extra stress on people, but so far our research suggests they can adjust." But it is not easy. She says cases of depression, anxiety, insomnia and mood swings have doubled in the past 20 years. Between 10% and 25% of Chongqing's people suffer mental problems. Suicide appears to be too sensitive a subject to discuss: the otherwise helpful authorities decline to give statistics. Kuang's mental health department was established only in 1998. Before that, mental problems were associated with Western decadence. Now, Kuang says, there is a recognition of the strains imposed by city life. "There is a conflict between rising expectations and people's sense of achievement." At the same time, she says, psychological disorders are "a sign of improved quality of life. People did not have time to worry about themselves so much ten years ago."
5pm
- The waste engineer
China's development is one of humanity's worst environmental disasters. Cheap coal and a doubling of car ownership every five years has made the country the second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. According to the World Bank, 16 of the planet's 20 dirtiest cities are in China, and Chongqing is one of the worst. Every year, the choking atmosphere is responsible for thousands of premature deaths and tens of thousands of cases of chronic bronchitis. Today's haze is so thick that I still haven't seen the sun. Chongqing is trying to clean up, but this is a low priority compared to economic growth. And it is hard to find a place for the ever-expanding waste. We head into the hills to see the biggest of the mega-city's rubbish mega-pits: the Changshengqiao landfill site. It is an awesome sight: a giant reservoir of refuse, more than 30 metres deep and stretching over 350,000 square metres. The waste engineer, Wang Yukun, tells me the city produces 3,500 tonnes of junk every day. None of it is recycled. Some is burned. Here, it is layered like lasagne: six metres of rubbish, half a metre of earth, a chemical treatment and then a huge black sheet of high-density polyethylene lining. The site opened in 2003 and it already contains more than a million tonnes of rubbish. "It was designed to serve the city for 20 years, but it has filled faster than we expected. I guess it will be completely full in 15 years," Wang says. "Once it is finished we will build a golf course on top."
10.30pm
- The new rich
Chongqing is not just urbanising, it is globalising. Little more than a generation ago, this was a city where Red Guards in Mao tunics chained anti-imperialist slogans. Today, young people with money dress much like their counterparts in Birmingham, Chicago or Nagoya. If anything, their values are even more materialistic. I am sitting in Falling, the hottest nightspot in Chongqing. It is only Wednesday night, but the dance floor is packed with beautiful people moving to techno music. Our table has an 800 yuan (£57) minimum charge, which covers a bottle of vodka, a few imported beers and a plate of elegantly carved fruit. I am joined by some of Chongqing's new rich, including the founder of a sweet factory, a restaurant owner and a bank employee. Almost without exception they are in their twenties, foreign-educated and well-connected - either through family or political ties - with the city's movers and shakers. "No businessman can thrive unless they have contacts in the Communist parry and the underworld," I am told.
12.30am
- The street kid
Outside at midnight, the bright lights cannot mask a seedier side of city life - the poor trawling through rubbish bins, the homeless on street corners, the touts offering drugs and sex for sale. Many of the women working as prostitutes are rural migrants. Their children are left with relatives or sent on to the streets to beg, sell flowers or sing songs for money. At a night market, a queue of hawkers comes to my table to offer to clean my shoes, sell me cigarettes or pour me soup from a flask. A desperate-looking girl appears carrying a menu of songs and a bartered, badly tuned guitar. She says she is 16 but looks more like 12. She has been in Chongqing only a few months and has already decided she does not like it. I pay 3 yuan (20p) and pick the song Pangyou ('Friend'). The young busker stares at some faraway point as she strums the one chord she knows and sings out of tune. It is miserably sad. Further along the street, a bangbang man wanders into the distance carrying his bamboo pole. I wonder if he is about to finish work or start it.