Beijing’s not going anywhere (2)

Don’t spill any on the way.

Beijing is the seat of government in China, but for how much longer? It’s an overcrowded city on the edge of a desert whose future prospects rely heavily on an expensive project designed to bring in water from rivers far to the south. Rather than move the water, why not move the city?

In a column for the Financial Times’ Chinese website (now available on China Dialogue), Ministry of Commerce researcher Mei Xinyu argued that China should seriously consider moving its capital elsewhere. Southern Weekly ran an excerpt of the piece, followed by an editor’s note that read:

The author of this piece is a researcher with the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. Although it is just one person’s opinion, it at least demonstrates that officials are aware of the problems of Beijing’s uncontrolled growth.

If the capital must be in Beijing, does it really have to be so huge? Yan Lieshan of the Southern Media Group argued in a Southern Metropolis Daily column that it really doesn’t; the Chinese people’s need to have a massive cultural and political center could be adjusted in the same way that their love of collective pageantry has faded in the wake of economic reforms since the 1980s.

Impossible, says Qiu Feng in an answering column, translated by Black and White Cat. Here’s an excerpt:

The deteriorating ecology of Shanxi and Hebei provinces, especially Shanxi, is famous around country. And a major cause of this deterioration is a lack of water. But these areas that are so short of water still have to provide water for others. Xinhua reports that from the beginning of October, Shanxi and Hebei provinces transported 4.5 million cubic meters of water to Beijing. Shanxi supplied 2.5 million cubic meters of this. Shanxi says that from 2003 to 2006, it sent water to Beijing four times. The total amount was 200 million cubic meters.

The only reason this place that lacks water has to export its precious water resources is that the destination is the capital. To this, Mr. Yan Lieshan asks: why must Beijing be the capital and why must it be so vast. Actually, under the current framework of government relations it doesn’t matter where the capital is located, the result will be the same. Wherever the capital is established, that place will inevitably become vast and exhaust its own resources. All other cities will have to serve it, and the greatest sacrifice will be made by the areas that surround it.

Qiu Feng goes on to explain how the “solid roots, weak branches” power structure adopted in imperial China is still at work today, and how that power structure encourages unequal resource distribution.

The people of Jilin City often talk of how, some day, the leaders of the province will wake up to the fact that moving the provincial capital to Changchun wasn’t the smartest idea in the world. But despite Jilin’s charms, it’s hard to imagine abandoning decades of development to move the government back. Moving the national capital out of Beijing is even less likely to happen.