Last year I reviewed Guy Arnold’s book Migration, in which he made the point that inter-country migration was vastly less significant in terms of sheer numbers than the seismic scale of migration from the countryside to the cities in Asia. Tom Miller’s timely book focuses on the Chinese element of this mass movement – what he rightly calls the ‘biggest migration in human history’ – and analyses the possible effects of such a huge demographic shift. He points out that China’s cities have become home to 500 million more people in the last 30 years, and its urban population is set to reach a billion by 2030.
Miller explains how this urbanization is creating an underclass who flee a subsistence existence in the villages and seek new lives and opportunities in the burgeoning cities. He outlines how the traditional system of household registration – houkou – severely restricts the access of incomers to services such as education and health, forcing them to live on the margins of the prosperity they are helping to create. The consequences of rapid expansion – rampant pollution, transport gridlock, ghettoization and social conflict – are painted in stark, almost apocalyptic terms by Miller. However, he outlines an alternative in which China’s urban planners get the big decisions right and the country takes its place as the world’s largest economy and global economic engine-room. The coming decades will determine which future comes to pass.
