and lifestyle services.16 This is hardly surprising given the rather crude array of stores and other local enterprises in certain areas, as well as the relative isolation of townships from markets and larger urban areas. The larger point, though, is that there is a need to stimulate domestic consumption in these places in order to move the economy of China in a sustainable direction, that is, away from energy-intensive and export-oriented manufacturing. Failure to encourage this type of economic development may well result in the nation falling again into a “middle-income trap,” as noted in the narrative of the townization plan.17 Beyond the development of a xiaokang—or a moderately prosperous society—progress to higher levels of economic well-being is also necessary. In many of these regards, the demographic profile of the nation is less than advantageous. The economic benefits of an expanding, economically active population peaked in 2010 and have begun to decline quite rapidly. Furthermore, most projections show that China’s total population is also likely to decline by around 2025 to 2035. Unless substantial productivity gains can be mustered by about 2025, including considerable shifts to the service or tertiary industrial sector, it will be ever more difficult to move beyond the attainment of xiaokang. In short, China is in something of a race with time, one in which success in reaching productive measures of urbanization and especially townization is pitted against failure in reaching sustainable levels of economic production and environmental well-being. The crucial period of transition—between 2015 and 2025—will be accompanied by an increasing risk to the future existence of villages, resulting in a continuous decline in the number of villages at the lower end of the urban-rural spectrum. Blandishments in the townization plan—rural residents increasing income by moving to towns and small cities, improvement of policies as incentives for those who decide to relocate, and plans for upgrading the urban employment of laborers—clearly minimize support for villages.18 Of course, increasing levels of townization involving many more residents may well enable these residents to increase their incomes through resettlement and employment in urban areas. Moreover, if townization is done appropriately, domestic demand—a foundational force in China’s economic development—will expand.19
42
Common Frameworks, Part 3
Union, as well as from the sheer deployment of a potentially productive population that hovered around the eradication of the same distinction.13 In more recent times, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao’s program of urban-rural coordination, promulgated in 2003, also sought a productive rapprochement between urban settlements and rural collectives, with the former leading the latter. Today’s townization planning seems to aim for a more complete urban-rural integration, one that will eventually efface any distinction between the rights, opportunities, and aspirations of citizens from either domain. At root, it is a policy about one people and a largely modern urban outcome. Another term that arises in a consideration of the urban-rural distinction is shiminhua, or the idea of easy integration of rural migrants, through a step-by-step process, into towns and smaller cities.14 Clearly, what is implied is that townization and, by extension, urbanization are civilizing influences on the populace. The notion of shiminhua also lies conceptually behind the people-oriented approach, as distinct from a purely physical strategy, being advanced in the townization plan. Indeed, it is the cultivation of a particular set of urban attitudes and orientations that is being touted in the plan, not matters of building. In addition, the core issue indicated in the need for integration is hukou status, or household registration; without such registration, migrants are deprived of basic public services, including access to education, health care, and affordable housing. Again the problem of unequal access to social services suggests that decisions and remedies, administrative and otherwise, and well beyond matters of physical development, are necessary. In reference to the dilemma of striking an appropriate balance between rates of urbanization and economic development, a disquieting aspect of the relatively rapid recent town-based urbanization is that nonagricultural employment has not kept pace. This was the case in about 60 percent of all local administrative units in China. To put it another way, in 67 percent of China’s counties, most towns did not create enough significant nonagricultural employment to enable the majority of new urban residents to cut ties to farming.15 In some places, this disparity appears to be more a matter of economic opportunity than of wealth. Numerous towns in Zhejiang Province, for example, have ratios of disposable income to expenditures of 1.5 or even 2 to 1, indicating a pent-up demand for, among other things, commercial, community,