From page , Observer, issue no. 369, May 26, 2008
Abridged Translation by Zuo Maohong
Original article: [Chinese]

After the devastating May 12 earthquake in Sichuan, the question of whether or not to rebuild the towns and cities at their former locations has come into deliberation.

An old Chinese saying goes, "a person is subjected to either long-term concerns or short-term troubles". To reduce potential losses in the long run, is it possible to call on locals to leave their traditional homes and move to safer places?

In a broader sense, should it be made a long-term policy to gradually reduce the population in the west, especially in quake-threatened zones?

While the majority of the Chinese population today are distributed in the east, there are still a considerable number of people living in oases scattered in the deserts and basins nestled in mountains in the western region.
Such distribution is inevitable and reasonable, and could be traced back to the development of an agricultural society, where land is the main resource to make a living.

When the population in the eastern plains – where flatter land, richer soils, more rainfall, and easier means of irrigation are located – has become too dense, and the land could no longer hold more population, newcomers had to move to interior, more remote regions and develop the relatively barren land there.

However, this caused great pressure on the fragile local ecology. The over-reclamation of grassland and forests has resulted in frequent floods, droughts, sand storms and severe water loss and soil erosion in western regions.

Historically, due to invasion by its neighboring nations, the Chinese territory shrank enormously during the Song dynasty (960AD -1279AD). In the following dynasties of Ming (1368AD -1662AD) and Qing (1363AD – 1911AD), however, the country enjoyed great power.

Under the pressure of a growing population, a great number of Han people moved from the middle and southeastern parts of the country to the southwest, northwest and northeast.

The migration resulted in Chinese who were politically, economically, culturally and technologically disadvantaged moving further into the depths of mountains, deserts, grasslands and forests.  

Impelled by the limited farmland and a ballooning population in the Song dynasty, the nation once strived for urbanization and an industrial society. Despite this attempt, China returned to its same old ways when its territory expanded greatly over the succeeding dynasties of Yuan (1271AD-1368AD), Ming and Qing.

After the 16th century, while western European countries, which lacked such a hinterland, shifted their focus to the ocean and new continents, China placed its attention on the newly-invaded frontiers, spreading out its population distribution.

This, in turn, increased the cost of communication and trade and further impeded division of work. As the population was dispersed, medium to large cities stopped expanding, and there were more people living in rural areas.

While Europe was progressing rapidly toward an urbanized, industrial society by accelerating development in technology, China, on the contrary, was retreating from urbanization, a major source of agglomerative effect and endogenous growth. 

This trend of population migration and inhabitation continued even after 1949, when the new Chinese republic was founded.

Under a planned economic system, industrialization, urbanization and modernization progressed slowly, and limited new employment opportunities failed to fuel the growth of urban population.

In the republic's history, there were examples of population flow to the western regions. During the phase of the "third line development" – meaning the inner area 700 kilometers or more from the coast – in the 1960s, large migrations from the east to west occurred.

In the 1970s, million of youths were sent from eastern urban areas to Xingjiang, Inner Mongolia, Yunnan and the northeast regions to help rural development. In addition, intellectuals were also dispatched to mountainous and rural areas during the Cultural Revolution.

As the population decentralized, communication between regions became inconvenient, and the division of work unclear.

If such a pattern, which has evolved through the history out of pursuit of farmland, was still to be retained, the cost to realize and maintain a modernized society would be high.

The cost included that of providing modern services, public infrastructure and utilities to a large and dispersed population. In the case of a dense population, all public utilities could be built within relatively smaller and concentrated space and be shared by all the people there; thus, the cost per person would be low.

In contrast, if a large population was spread out in the mountains, deserts, or forests that were far from the plains and main transportation routes, the same quality and quantity of modern services would require a much higher cost.

All the developed countries choose to lower this cost by centralizing the population and industries through urbanization.

A dense population also brings other benefits, for example, the faster spread of knowledge and information, more widespread education, better technology, more competition, lower trading costs, and more opportunities for different talents.

With this in mind, it's understandable why the US population is less evenly distributed than our population, though the US population is only one-fourth of China's.
 
The same is true with Japan, where 70% of its populations lives along the narrow stretch of the Osaka-Nagoya-Tokyo area and settlements are rarely found in many places in the northern island of Hokkaido.

In view of that, if China wished to lower its cost of urbanization, the tradition of population distribution would have to be changed; and this change becomes more urgent in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake.   

If the population there were to gradually move to the eastern and middle parts of China, not only would the cost of reconstruction be lowered, but the loss of lives and possessions in potential quakes in the future would also be reduced.

When developed countries like the US and Japan redistributed their population in the earlier years, they depended on land privatization and market guidance.

I believe that not only could land privatization help speed up urbanization and reduce its cost, it would also make it easier for migrants from west China to melt into places located in the east and middle regions.

Therefore, in addition to a new round of migration, China needs to consider adjusting its current land system which limits migration and urbanization.

What's worth noticing is that the expansion of territory resulting from migrations over the centuries had been motivated by private ownership of land.

Today, in a different historical background, and for the sake of reducing the cost of modernization and unnecessary loss of lives in the quake zones, a new round of large-scale migration should be encouraged in China.

The difference is that this time, the migrants would move in the opposite direction from the previous rounds – the children and grandchildren of those once forced into the mountains due to population pressure, should be encouraged to migrate to nearby plains, and perhaps later to the middle and eastern regions, so that they could share the prosperity and better ecological environment.

In order to facilitate this migration and speed up urbanization, the current rigid, government-monopolized land system should be reformed.

Wen Guanzhong, teaches at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and in the department of economics at Trinity College, Connecticut, USA.